Articles on Development

Prakash Venkatraman

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.

Eric Fung

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 …

Rit Li

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 …

Jon Rogers

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.

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

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 …

Linden Melvin

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.

Zoe Madden-Wood

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 …

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

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.

Sarah Port

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the open source community, you’re probably familiar with GitHub issues. Issues are a fantastic way to organize the discussion around bugs and feature development in a codebase, and it’s common for open source projects to rely on issues to communicate actionable chunks of work to contributors. This …

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

Hooks significantly simplify your code, and you can use them within an existing React codebase that otherwise uses classes. And it’s easy to dive right into using hooks – until you try to test your fancy new components.