Gatsby Tutorial Post Part 2: NetlifyCMS and Styling

This is the 2nd part of a tutorial series on building fast and elegant sites with Gatsby, Material-ui, and NetlifyCMS (part 1 here). The previous part of the tutorial showed how to setup Gatsby and create pages manually as well as dynamically using gatsby-node.js. ... more

Gatsby Tutorial Post Part 2: NetlifyCMS and Styling

This is the 2nd part of a tutorial series on building fast and elegant sites with Gatsby, Material-ui, and NetlifyCMS (part 1 here). The previous part of the tutorial showed how to setup Gatsby and create pages manually as well as dynamically using gatsby-node.js. ... more

Build Fast and Elegant Sites with Gatsby, NetlifyCMS and Material-UI

Gatsby is React-based framework that has recently gained a lot traction and use in production. AirBnb, Flamingo (female brand of those cool Harry’s razors), and Impossible Foods are all companies using Gatsby to build production sites and apps. Gatsby ... more

Staticly Typed JavaScript Language and Library Options

Over the last 3-6 years, staticly typed languages and libraries like TypeScript, Flow, and Dart have steadily gained traction in the world of JavaScript web development. More developers, teams, and companies are adopting them every week. This article ... more

AirNYT: Firebase Favoriting & Final UI Tweaks

This is the last tutorial in a series called AirNYT, which shows how to the clone the Airbnb search interface to explore NYT travel recommendations. This section of the series will cover: Installing Firebase to allow for user authentication and saving ... more

AirNYT: Pagination + Filtering + Responsiveness

This tutorial picks up where we left off around building the map and markers. This is part of a larger tutorial series on cloning the Airbnb map and cards interface to be able to explore the last 7 years of New York Times travel recommendations. The ... more

AirNYT: Building the Map and Markers Interactivity

This tutorial is a part of a larger tutorial series on cloning the Airbnb map/cards interface to be able to explore the last 7 years of New York Times travel recommendations. The short name for this app/series is AirNYT. In this part of the tutorial, ... more

React-Virtualized + Material-UI Cards for Fast Lists (airbnb + nyt part 4)

This tutorial will cover how to use React-virtualized with Material-ui Cards and Grid to make a list of image-heavy cards that loads extremely fast. Doing this not only allows for much faster loading and re-rendering (such as when using client-side filters) ... more

AirNYT: React-Virtualized + Material-UI Cards for Fast Lists

This tutorial will cover how to use React-virtualized with Material-ui Cards and Grid to make a list of image-heavy cards that loads extremely fast. Doing this not only allows for much faster loading and re-rendering (such as when using client-side filters) ... more

AirNYT: Setup + Architecture + Basic Components

This tutorial is part of a blog series on building an airbnb-esque interface for exploring New York Times travel recommendations. In this part of the series, I’ll show how to build the overall components and interface. Here’s what will get built: Demo: ... more

BucketList App: Setup + Architecture + Basic Components (part 2)

This tutorial is part of a blog series on building an airbnb-esque interface for exploring New York Times travel recommendations. In this part of the series, I’ll show how to build the overall components and interface. Here’s what will get built: Demo: ... more

25 Public React Repos/Apps to Inspire Your Next Project (part 2)

We all love seeing what other developers have done with the tools we use. Like many front-end developers, we continue to be thoroughly in love with React and build most of our software with it. Part 1 of this blog series covered 12 solid React projects ... more

Map Making with Google Sheets and React

Data visualizations have gotten a lot more popular over the last 5-10 years with the rise of software like D3, Tableau, and infographics. Maps just might be the original data visualization. In fact, maps are so commonplace that we don’t often see them ... more

AWS Mobile Hub File Storage for Mobile Apps

Using AWS for file storage is a great way to add data upload capabilities to your mobile apps. It can easily be added to your app and give you inexpensive storage space online. If you have AWS Authentication added to your app it can allow users to upload ... more

12 Public React Repos/Apps to Inspire Your Next Project

In the last couple of years, React has risen to become a massively popular JavaScript library and developer ecosystem. There are tens of thousands of software projects that use React and many of them are publicly available on Github. It’s fun and enlightening ... more

AWS Mobile Hub File Storage for Mobile Apps

Using AWS for file storage is a great way to add data upload capabilities to your mobile apps. It can easily be added to your app and give you inexpensive storage space online. If you have AWS Authentication added to your app it can allow users to upload ... more

25 Public React Repos/Apps to Inspire Your Next Project (part 1)

In the last couple of years, React has risen to become a massively popular JavaScript library and developer ecosystem. There are tens of thousands of software projects that use React and many of them are publicly available on Github. It’s fun and enlightening ... more

The Simple Stack: A Primer on Using React + Google Sheets API

Data-driven web applications are invaluable for all sorts of people and businesses. But updating or changing data in a relational or NoSQL database is not something most non-programmers can do. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could power simple applications ... more

Four Ways to Create a Successful Technical Training Program

There are few sure things in life, but there are a lot of probables. You’ll probably pay taxes, you’ll probably waste time looking at social media on your phone, and at some point, someone will probably make you angry. However, when it comes to technical ... more

15 Blogs Every Javascript Developer Should Follow in 2018

I’ve been following the most interesting JavaScript blogs quite for a while now (this is a part of my job running https://weekendjs.com/). There are many of them. More than you might think. There are blogs started more than ten years ago, and there are ... more

How to Build a Simple Chat App with React Native and Firebase

In mobile development, cross-platform applications are appreciated for their short development cycle, low cost, and quick time to market in comparison with native apps. One popular framework that enables developers to build hybrid mobile apps is React ... more

Manage Your JavaScript Canvas Elements

The browser JavaScript ecosystem moves fast . It’s easy to become overwhelmed trying to keep up with new browser features and JavaScript application frameworks. Oftentimes, developers get burnt out by trying to keep up, and it can feel like you’re rewriting ... more

Official Vue Projects You Probably Don’t Know About

One of the things that Vue has done to set it apart from its competitors, like React, is to create officially supported projects to fill the gaps in its ecosystem. For example, React-Router and Redux were not created by and are not supported directly ... more

A Kinto Backend for the Vue Tutorial Search App

A couple of months ago we started a Vue app that lists and searches for web development tutorials. It works nicely but was missing some key things. All of the data was hard-coded into the application and couldn’t be changed. Today we’ll be changing that. ... more

Simplifying Your Workflow With Vue Development Tools

Simplifying Your Workflow with Vue Development Tools As you begin to use any framework more, you’ll want some tools that help you streamline your workflow. This is true of Vue as well, so I’ll introduce you to a couple of tools today that will do just ... more

Unit Testing Vue Components

Unit Testing Vue Components If you’re wise, before you decide to use a framework, you check to make sure you’ll be able to adequately unit test your application if that framework is in place. So, before jumping onto the Vue bandwagon, this question must ... more

The Journey from Vue to MobX

I recently began using React with MobX at my new company. Having used Vue with VueX at my previous job, I immediately noticed congruence between the two patterns. What I had become so fond of with Vue after being a long time React/Redux user, I found ... more

Using Horizon/RethinkDB with React

Horizon is an open source Backend as a Service (BaaS) that allows developers to easily build data-driven web and mobile applications. Horizon, which is built on RethinkDB and by the RethinkDB team, facilitates common application development tasks like ... more

Where to Study Web Development (Solo) in 2017

appendTo offers web development training courses for teams of developers. That said, we realize many people are learning web development and JavaScript on their own. Thankfully, there’s more resources than ever for solo learners. Here’s some of our favorite ... more

Maintainable and Optimized CSS with CSS Modules

There have been many techniques proposed to help developers develop maintainable and scalable CSS, some of which oppose each other rather directly. BEM was designed to avoid class name clashes, too much specificity, and is organized around components. ... more