React v16.9.0 and the Roadmap Update
August 7th, 2019
Today we are releasing React 16.9. It contains several new features, bugfixes, and new deprecation warnings to help prepare for a future major release. New Deprecations Renaming Unsafe Lifecycle Methods Over a year ago, we announced that unsafe lifecycle methods are getting renamed: componentWillMount → UNSAFE_componentWillMount componentWillReceiveProps → UNSAFE_componentWillReceiveProps componentWillUpdate → UNSAFE_componentWillUpdate React 16.9 does…
Using Immer for React State Management
August 7th, 2019
We make use of state to keep track of application data. States change as users interacts with an application. When this happens, we need to update the state that is displayed to the user, and we do this using React’s setState. Since states are not meant to be updated directly (because React’s state has to…
Quick Gulp Cache Busting
August 7th, 2019
You should for sure be setting far-out cache headers on your assets like CSS and JavaScript (and images and fonts and whatever else). That tells the browser “hang on to this file basically forever.” That way, when navigating from page to page on a site — or revisiting it, or refreshing the page — the…
Let’s Give Grunt Tasks the Marie Kondo Organization Treatment
August 6th, 2019
We live in an era of webpack and npm scripts. Good or bad, they took the lead for bundling and task running, along with bits of Rollup, JSPM and Gulp. But let’s face it. Some of your older projects are still using good ol’ Grunt. While it no longer glimmers as brightly, it does the…
SSCCE
August 6th, 2019
You know what a “reduced test case” is, right? We’ve talked about it here. I imagine the concept is useful in many walks of life, but in the world of front-end development, you can think of it like: A reduced test case is a demo/example page you create which reproduces the problem you are having…
Using Your Domain with a Netlify-Hosted Site
August 6th, 2019
Netlify has their own docs for Custom Domains, so if you’re looking for horse’s mouth technical docs on this stuff, that should be treated as the source of truth. But I’d like to take a crack at it from a slightly different angle, where we look at where you are and what you wanna do,…
Let Mavo Shine in Building Interactive Web Applications
August 5th, 2019
As you could guess from the title, this tutorial is dedicated to Mavo: a new, approachable way to create complex, reactive, persistent web applications just by writing HTML and CSS, without a single line of JavaScript and no server backend. 🐇 Follow the white rabbit! Mavo is developed in the Haystack Group at MIT CSAIL…
Can you nest @media and @support queries?
August 5th, 2019
Yes, you can, and it doesn’t really matter in what order. A CSS preprocessor is not required. It works in regular CSS. This works: @supports(–a: b) { @media (min-width: 1px) { body { background: red; } } } And so does this, the reverse nesting of the above: @media (min-width: 1px) { @supports(–a: b) {…
The Real Dark Web
August 5th, 2019
Here’s a wonderful reminder from Charlie Owen that everyone in the web design industry isn’t using the latest and greatest technology. And that’s okay! Charlie writes: Most web developers are working on very “boring” teams. They’re producing workhorse products that serve the organisation needs. They aren’t trying to innovate. They aren’t trying to impress the…
Branching Out from the Great Divide
August 2nd, 2019
I like the term Front-End Developer. It’s encapsulates the nature of your job if your concerns are: Building UIs for web browsers The spectrum of devices and platforms those web browsers run on The people who use those web browsers and related assistive technology The breadth of knowledge for all-things front-end development has gotten super…