Category: code

React Hooks! Hooks! Hooks! Hooks! Sorry, had to yell that a few times to get it out of my system. I definitely find React Hooks to be one of the most exciting new features that has hit React in a long time. I don't think I've been this excited about a new feature since React…

A couple of months ago I started working on a side project called TV Chat. My goal with this project was to create a website where people online could come together to chat about tv shows as they were airing live on TV. I'm a big tv watcher, and I like watching TV shows with…

A little while ago I decided to play with Facebook's Nuclide project. I was curious what enhancements it added to Atom and if any of them would increase my workflow. I found the project altogether nice, bringing in some nice additions to Atom. However it also adds a lot of…

I've long struggled with teaching Redux. It's such a fundamental different way of thinking. When I search for comparisons to ease the concepts I always find myself sputtering words that never quite bridge that gap. I've realized the reason I struggle with teaching Redux is…

I gave my presentation on React Native ART and D3 at the React Native NYC Meetup .

I gave a workshop for ForwardJS 2017.

Earlier this year I had the great opportunity to be a speaker at the Crater Remote Conference . I presented about my experiences with using React Native ART and D3 , giving a complete walkthrough and explanation of my example application BetterWeather . The recording of this…

Introducing Reptar 2.0.0! It is with great pride that I announce the release Reptar 2.0.0, a static site generator that roars. Install it now! Now hold on a second, you might be asking yourself, What happened to Reptar 1.0.0? Well Reptar is actually the static site generator…

This is a follow up to my previous article about my experiences using React Native I gave a talk on this topic which you can watch The most powerful feature of React Native is that it lets you write your native application using React and JavaScript. React is certainly powerful…

A couple of months ago I wrote a React Native application, the new Chartbeat iOS App . It was a great experience. I got to learn a lot about React Native and was able to create and launch an app. If there's anything I like more than writing software, it's releasing it. I was…

Note! Yarn has been renamed to Reptar Hello everyone! I want to introduce you to my newest creation, Yarn ! Yarn is a static site generator that I wrote. It was built due to my frustrations with the current static site generators available. I figured, "Hey, it can't be that…

Over the weekend I created a clone of Hacker News with Angular2 . I've read a lot about the changes Angular 2 will have and I wanted to see for myself what it would be like to create an app. What would it be like? How will it be better than Angular 1? Will I enjoy writing an…

Atom is a hackable code editor from the fine folks at GitHub. It's written entirely in JavaScript (specifically CoffeeScript) and runs in a self contained Chromium environment. It's new and young, yet slowly growing in popularity and features. After using Sublime Text for the…

This week Hacker News announced its official API . This is really great news. Prior to this official API all 3rd-party apps resorted to scraping the website to as their data source, a brittle and unscalable practice. This new API provides a standard and efficient way to create…

Last Thursday Chartbeat hosted the Frontend Innovators Meetup group at our office. The focus was Angular.js , and my co-workers and I had the good fortune of being presenters. Our goal was to share some of the experiences and insights we’ve gained over the past year working…

Front-end engineers have gone through a bit of a renaissance in recent years. There's been a wild and wonderful spurt in innovation that has completely changed what it means to be a front-end developer. We now have a vast and wide array of tools available to us, allowing us to…

In a large ExpressJS application it is not optimal to define all your routes and handlers in the same file. For the sake of code clarity and cleanliness Express route handlers are often placed in their own file. Those files are then included in the file that is bootstraps your…

When Sublime Text 3 was released I groaned along with many others. Why a new version? What are the incompatibilities? But most importantly: Will all my old packages that I know and love still work?? After attempting (and succeeding) in upgrading to ST3 and trying to install all…

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Git is one of the most powerful and effective revision control systems available. It's lightweight and highly configurable, complimenting almost anyone's programming workflow. Predominately you interact with git from the command line, inputting commands such as or to…

Git is a wonderful version control system. It’s light, nimble, and fast. It makes managing code amongst many developers a dream. Unfortunately it has a fair share of quirks. One of the quirkiest quirks that I’ve run into a couple times now is an issue with remote git branches…

A week ago I started work on a personal web project using PHP as my programming language of choice. This wasn’t a hard decision as I use PHP daily for work and have a great deal of strength in the language. As I set forward to create my web app I knew I wanted to use a prebuilt…

One of the coolest new additions to the CSS3 specification is its built-in ability to render rounded corners. Before CSS3 the only semi-humane way to create rounded corners on an element was to create four rounded corner images and use some unwieldy albeit effective display…