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Web Development How-To for Humans

  • Converting a static button to a react component

    I’m in the process of converting the front end components of my checklist app from static elements defined in the html to reusable react components. I feel compelled to point out that this is not strictly necessary as my app is very small and already renders very fast with the server-rendered express views. However, I’ve…

  • Why Technical Debt Matters

    Technical debt is a term to describe the side effects of accumulated design decisions over the lifetime of project development and maintenance. Technical debt can be accrued in a number of ways. In his book ‘Essential Scum’, Kenneth Rubin defines three distinct sources of technical debt: naive technical debt– caused by team member, business, or…

  • Will AI replace development as we know it?

    So much discussion on developer threads these days surrounds debate over AI’s role and proper place in modern development. I’ve seen primarily two stances taken, that are in opposition to each other. The one thing they do have in common is that they both envision AI as a permanent part of the development process, albeit…

  • How to integrate a react component into an Expressjs app

    In a previous post, I walked thru converting an expressjs partial into a react component. Now that I have that set up, in this post I’ll define the subsequent step of integrating the component into the app. Our component is built as an exportable ES6 module, but it is not yet imported anywhere. This project…

  • Project process: when to choose waterfall, scrum, or both

    Scrum is a popular project process in the world of development. However, it’s not necessarily always the choice that makes sense or is feasible. In some cases, such as performing work for a highly-regulated industry, it may not be be realistic to employ scrum, as the ability to iterate and explore ideas during the development…

  • How to safeguard connection variables for a public repo

    Recently I ran into a challenge with a repo that I am actively building with. The repo houses the code for my Bedtime Checklist App, a small app I’ve built to aid in guiding distracted children thru bedtime in the evenings. If you’ve ever tried getting an overstimulated 5 year old to bed, you know…

  • How I resolved a reload issue with gulp and browserSync

    The gulp build for my small express app– now with react integrated for some components on the frontend– was running into a strange issue when making edits. I had set up the gulp process such that it reloaded at the end of a file watch, once that watch was triggered: As the code indicates, the…

  • How to convert an Expressjs partial to a React component

    Recently I decided to convert some of the partials in my small express app into React components. The partials have worked just fine up to now- my immediate reason to convert them is to simply game some experience working with React. Eventually, I anticipate having the elements in a React component will enable me to…

  • How to use props to pass custom classes to react components

    It is sometimes important to be able to pass custom class names to different instances of react components. React allows for this via an array prop passed to the component: nav.jsx: The prop of customClass is assigned an empty array, and then using interpolation the Array method of .join is called on it. In my…

  • How to avoid or resolve conflicts between nodemon and browserSync reloads

    When implementing node into my existing node app, I ran into an issue where jsx compilation reloads were hanging in the browser. This was specific to jsx only. I had a separate sass built that was reloading just fine. What I found was that there was a clash between my nodemon server reload and the…

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