
While the development industry may have its ups and downs, there's never been as much strive to make it as accessible and usable as possible. With the rise of AI tools, development has become even more efficient, but that doesn't change the fundamentals of why now is the best time ever to be into programming and building products.

One of the...

Why it's never been a better time to be a developer


One of the biggest challenges in front-end development is UI decisions. When you go through business flows, especially if you don't have a design scheme to match, it's very difficult to understand which UI approach is best. For example, if you are on a screen where you have to select another node with a bunch of options, you may decide...

Use your favourite games to enhance your users' experience


These days, Rust is an extremely popular alternative to traditional js/ts packages. Next.js, the most popular react framework, recently bought up swc, a Rust compiler. Rust has a stellar community, type safety, and loyal fans — 3 things that C++ does not have.

From the outside perspective, it's weird that the two would have much crossover. Rust is compiled into a...

Typescript to Rust


Fullstack engineers are expected to be able to architect backend solutions, as well as be a gun on the frontend. There's much more to learn after SCSS, LESS, BEM, JS, frontend folder structures, Jekyll, and frontmatter and markdown, and the npm ecosystem.

There's Typescript patterns, AWS services, serverless architectures, using CloudFormation templates / aws-cdk / SAM instead of the AWS Console,...

Fullstack of all trades, master of none


A few weeks ago, I had no idea what the aws-cdk was. "Is it like aws-sdk ?", "Is it a Python script?" After starting to use it, I managed to get a grip on it.

aws-cdk is a way of programmatically declaring CloudFormation templates. Put another way, aws-cdk generates CloudFormation templates from code.

Background

To understand the CDK, it is important to understand...

What the heck is `aws-cdk`?


TL;DR: Here's a quick example

If you're making a post or blog, it's important to make sure your code examples are highlighted so that people can read them. Here is a highlighted example snippet:

beforeEach(() => {
  initializeCityDatabase();
});
test("city database has Vienna", () => {
  expect(isCity("Vienna")).toBeTruthy();
});

highlight.js is a very popular package for highlighting code on a webpage. It has great features...

Using highlight.js in React


In JS applications, many types of testing provide business value and security for businesses. These include:

Unit tests, which test business logic of small pieces of code
Integration tests, which test how microservices & services function
End-to-end tests (e2e)

Each of these tests are important, but if you are just starting testing now, then unit tests are a great place to start, especially if...

Unit testing tools in React applications


Recently, I rebuilt my main website, in Remix.run. The site was originally made in Gatsby, then remade in Next.js (see legacy site), then remade again in Remix. It has given me a great perspective about creating websites, and the changes over the years in building them.

You may be surprised to know that my opinion of web technologies in 2022 is...

Remix.run and web performance


Professional changes recently have exposed me to new thinkers in the React space, which I appreciate. There is so much to a framework ecosystem to explore, and new ways to deliver better products quicker.

Frameworks

We are in a discovery phase of moving away from our previous frameworks, Ant and Spectrum (don't use these), and needed a new component library system to...

New React


Good products require good design.

If you're making your own product, you will need to be your own designer. Trying to get good at design is very hard, especially for people like me who have little design talent. Recently, I have been using Figma, which has been very helpful, as it follows component principles. This means I can make a set...

Design as a developer


As you may or may not know, I am based in a small town at the bottom of the world: Dunedin, New Zealand. As a dev, this comes with quite a few quirks.

I first moved from Invercargill, a minuscule town on the Antarctic edge of New Zealand, up to Otago University in Dunedin. Then to Auckland, then back to Dunedin...

Small-town code


My top tools

Are you a node dev? Do you like tools? Here my top tools.
More coming soon.

Next Js and Vercel

Gahd damn this is a great platform for hosting and CI/CD of websites.

TS Node

Want Typescript and Node? Use this.

Icones

Noice icons.

Lerna

Monorepo management. I f\*cking hate this package, but it is one of the best at hoisting.

More coming soon....

Top Tools


Next JS

I recently converted my website and blog to Next JS, and brought my lighthouse performance up from 60% to 97% -- while still using an external component library. Fantastic gains.

I have also started using Vercel as my primary CI/CD for websites. It provides so much for free, and is optimised for Next websites, although it can host much more.

Pain...

Next JS


Now there are filters up the top to differentiate between the different topics of the posts! Yay!

Other updates (for nerds)

I have made some subtle changes under the hood.

bigiron.css

I have added the CSS theming for @robbie-cook/react-components as a modified bigiron.css.
This allows me to take advantage of CSS variables for theming.

Using CSS variables for theming font & colors was something that I...

Blog Update - Filters


NOTE: Blog has now been migrated to Next.js

Introduction

Welcome to my blog\! It's created in Gatsby, and it uses Markdown with frontmatter to render the content.The actual renderer is Markdown Remark, and it integrates really well into Gatsby.

Here is one of the resources I used to create this: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/adding-markdown-pages/

Along with the \gatsby-node.js\ API, Gatsby seems to work really well for blogs,...

Blog