Articles on Development
Authorization and Authentication in GraphQL
Introduction GraphQL is growing in popularity because it allows applications to request only the data they need using a strongly-typed, self-documenting query structure that enables an API to deliver data that can evolve over time. Unlike traditional REST APIs, GraphQL exposes a single endpoint to query and mutate data. Upon learning this, one of the …
Writing ZSH Themes: A Quickref
Customizing your terminal is a fun way to streamline and personalize your digital workspace. People are more productive when using tools they enjoy and tend to value things they made themselves at a premium, but, as with all technical adventures, it can also be a little tedious to track down all the relevant documentation. This …
Cross-Platform Elixir Releases with Docker
While releases are meant to be self-contained executables, they still call out to native system libraries to do things like open TCP sockets and write to files. That means that the native libraries referenced at compile time need to be exactly the same as the ones on your target machine. Unless you can guarantee that your workstation and cloud are exactly the same, releases can seem like only half the promise of a stress-free deployment.
Migrating From Sprockets to Webpacker
Starting with Rails 6, Webpacker became the default asset compiler, replacing sprockets–better known as the asset pipeline. While the asset pipeline was a big step for its time in making it easy to package JS, CSS, and images, webpack has matured enough to do all of the above and more, due to modern JavaScript’s support …
Running Multiple Versions of Postgres with Docker Compose for Local Development
Say we have Project X and Project Y that require Postgres 9 and Postgres 10 respectively. These projects aren’t using Docker to manage their Postgres dependency so it is up to each developer to manage this themselves. How do we get different versions of Postgres running simultaneously on our workstation without making any modifications to …
Why Write Good Pull Requests?
Writing a good, clean pull request description gives us developers a chance to use words (not code) to explain why we are making the change, describe the problem this code is solving, and provide context around why we chose a particular implementation.
The Best of Both Worlds: HTML Apps & Svelte
At Carbon Five we try to be agile about our technology choices and pick the simplest tool for the job at hand. That means that even in 2019, the era of React and Redux and GraphQL and all the other fancy tools for client-side web applications, sometimes the best tool for our clients is a …
Replacing Component Lifecycle Methods with React Hooks
When writing React components, we sometimes need access to lifecycle events to handle a variety of side effects: fetching data on mount, sanitizing props when the component updates, cleaning up before the component unmounts, etc.
Changes Requested
Each team has their own tolerance for what is and is not a reason to request changes on a PR and block it from being merged. This may be rooted in process, fairness, and expediency, and may be a company or team decision. Whatever your personal philosophy may be, the team as a whole and …
Optimizing Performance in React 16.8
React Dev Tools comes with a profiler that can help pin down performance problems, and React 16.8 came with some features to make it easier to improve performance of functional components. But to use these tools effectively you need to know what the problem is and how to find the culprit.