I have been working on a React Native wrapper library for the Zendesk Support SDK. The SDK uses functions that accept a callback to upload a file. I wanted to upload an array of files and when all of the files were open, I wanted to call another function ... more
Sometimes it is helpful to patch an npm module. It could be the case that you need to make a simple fix and you don’t want to maintain a fork of the library. The library may have a pull request to fix the issue but you don’t want to use an unmerged branch. ... more
Recently, I was working on a project where I needed to fetch a file from the internet and parse it line by line. NodeJS has the readline module that can be used to split a data stream into lines and perform a function on each line, which was perfect ... more
I am the co-organizer of the BeerJS meetings for TahoeJS. BeerJS is a casual meetup for JavaScript developers that has chapters all over the world. Our meetup is largely organized using a Github repo. As co-organizer, one of my monthly tasks is to create ... more
Creating Your First npm Package Lately, I’ve been pushing myself to contribute more to open source. I started by contributing to existing projects: small features and writing documentation. I even wrote a blog post about it. This past week, I was finally ... more
On the surface, I have a stereotypical story for a programmer: I started programming at a young age, went to college for computer science and now I’m a senior JavaScript developer. But for around 8 years, I didn’t program at all and didn’t work in a ... more
At Build.com, I’m working on an e-commerce app using React Native. React Native allows us to write apps in JavaScript that can run on iOS and Android phones with near native performance. The other day, we received several crash reports from users running ... more
The project that I’m working on is an e-commerce app for an online retailer, Build.com, built using React Native. React Native is a JavaScript framework that allows you to build cross-platform mobile apps in JavaScript that have near-native performance. ... more
I’ve been working with React Native lately, which uses the Fetch API for asynchronously fetching data from web services. Recently, I came across a really strange error. Certain calls (in particular, calls to fetch data for new users) would cause an error, ... more
A lot of front-end web development involves displaying sorted lists on a page and maintaining the state and logic of the list. These sorted lists may be things like a list of products or an employee directory. Often, we will give the user the ability ... more
This post is Part 2 of a series of blog posts where I’ll convert an Angular 1.x project to Angular 2. In Part 1, I upgraded the Angular client to use the latest guidelines in the John Papa Angular Style Guide. Node.js has improved by leaps and bounds ... more
This post is Part 1 of a series of blog posts where I’ll convert an Angular 1.x project to Angular 2. Angular.js has changed a lot over the past few years. As the framework has matured, not only have new features been added, but the style in which we ... more
The latest version of Babel, the ES2015 transpiler, is out and there have been enough changes that I’ve decided to revise my original blog post, “How To Set Up the Babel Plugin in WebStorm”. At the time of writing, Babel is on version 6; my original ... more
A project came up recently where I needed to display a value on a range of values. You can imagine something like the display on an old thermostat: a range of values are displayed with a marker to indicate the current value. The prior solution involved ... more
A project came up recently that involved building a Google Map with a set of markers on it in an Angular single page app. All of the markers needed to be labeled with their rank number. Markers could be red or blue and “inactive” markers would have a ... more