Build a reusable, functional animation component for using React Hooks.

Handling auth is painful. But most applications need to authenticate users and control what resources they can access. Microservices…

Microinteractions guide a user through your application. They reinforce your user experience and provide delight.

A prospective founder must ask: is my idea viable? But this question also must be addressed throughout the startup’s life. This story is my…

Developers are adopting Higher Order Components (HOC) Stateless Functional Components, and for good reason: they make it easier to achieve…

How to build an Electron app using create-react-app. No webpack configuration or “ejecting” necessary. I recently built an Electron app using create-react-app. I didn’t need to muck about with Webpac

Explaining the Joy of Refactoring (to the non-developer) I thought of the above sketch when I recently was explaining why refactoring can be joyous for a developer. A common workflow pattern is to ma

Debugging tests in WebStorm and create-react-app TL;DR: Here is a GitHub repo that has a create-react-app project with necessary dev dependencies and the WebStorm run configurations. npm install and

The Field of Dreams Test We all know the line; but a startup should ask: “If we build it, will anyone care?” It can be very tempting to jump to developing an idea and then get caught up in the excite

North Star Questions and Principles I think it is easy to lose focus, especially in a startup. There is always too much to do, so much to learn and explore, changing pressures, limited resources…and

How TDD Changed My Career While the title of this post may seem provocative or an exaggeration, when I first read Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development: By Example, it had a profound effect on me. It w

Open Source Software Policy Open Source Software can be a very good thing; why reinvent something? But its use can make the legal departments of many companies uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I’ve seen

My Process There is a method to my madness, that has evolved over the years. FWIW, I am outlining it in this post. (The sketchnote is more useful than the text below, me thinks.) A summary of my gene

Slack Notifications Filter I use Slack a lot. Besides team communication, it is great for richly formatted log messages emitted by microservices. For example, you can embed images and links. Unfortun

Strategy Bridge Google “strategy” and you’ll find books, blogs, podcasts, videos, cartoons, etc. (I’ve consumed more on the topic than I’d like admit.) At the risk of writing a “me too” post, here ar

justideas.io: Context Matters A good idea is only a good idea in a particular context. This is the essential tenet behind justideas.io. Sometimes the context is very broad and the idea might apply to