Demystifying TypeScript's Extract Type

Many of the applications we develop at Widen utilize TypeScript for front-end development to provide a high level of type safety while also remaining familiar to developers who are used to JavaScript. In one such application, a need arose that required ... more

Sometimes, a Billion Laughs Aren't so Funny — Improving CSS Variables in WebKit

Widen, like many companies, makes heavy use of open-source technology, and we’ve made it a part of our mission to give back to this community that we benefit so much from. In light of this, in this post I’ll be talking about some improvements I made ... more

Automating Code Transformation With jscodeshift

The JavaScript ecosystem is fast paced and continuously changing. By the time you finish adopting some fancy new library, another library has come along with people telling you to drop everything and adopt it. Even if you pick a library and stick with ... more

A Tale of Performance - JavaScript, Rust, and WebAssembly

Welcome to another Widen engineering blog post! Today, we’re going to embark on a journey of optimization. We’ll compare and contrast multiple approaches to solving a simple performance problem, one of which being the web’s newest and shiniest addition, ... more

A Tale of Performance - JavaScript, Rust, and WebAssembly

Welcome to another Widen engineering blog post! Today, we’re going to embark on a journey of optimization. We’ll compare and contrast multiple approaches to solving a simple performance problem, one of which being the web’s newest and shiniest addition, ... more

AWS CloudFront User Authentication using Lambda@Edge

Our CI system is configured to write build reports to a S3 bucket. However, we found that there’s no easy way to serve private files without running an EC2 instance with proxy software or living with the limitations of IP address restrictions using IAM ... more

The Future of Web Development Part 2 - Full-Stack Automated JavaScript Testing

In my last article, I showed you how to develop a full-stack JavaScript web application using ECMAScript 6, Falcor, React, Babel, Webpack, and Node.JS. Developing a project using this futuristic stack is undoubtedly fun, but this is only a piece of the ... more

The Future of Web Development - React, Falcor, and ES6

In this article, I’m going provide a glimpse into the future of web development. You will gain a new perspective on structuring a user interface, server, and data endpoints. In other words, I will cover the full “stack” - both the browser and server ... more

Tomcat Hates Encoded Slashes

Let’s picture a small segment of a typical web application in order to better understand this problem. We’ll focus mostly on the server here, but the client plays a key role as well. On the server, we have a REST endpoint that exists to proxy information ... more