Latest Posts
Technical Writing Tips
Sunday, Aug 12 2018
Writing my React book has been humbling: I wasn’t as good a writer as a I imagined. Here’s some what I’ve learnt working with my editor.
Backing up MySQL with Percona XtraBackup
Wednesday, Jun 27 2018 in startup
The logical backup created by
mysqldumpwas just 430MB. but for testing I wanted to repeatedly tear down and restore the same database. The restore was too slow even after disabling foreign key checks and unique checks.I decided to try Percona XtraBackup. Here’s how I completed a full backup and restore. For incremental backups, you must do things a little differently, but I won’t handle incremental backups in this post.
The Sociology of Input Validation
Friday, Jun 15 2018 in architecture
Maybe writing programs that accept whatever data comes in, and dealing with the consequences later, isn’t as sloppy as it sounds.
Havoc with Hibernate Filters and Inheritance
Sunday, Jun 10 2018 in java
After migrating from Hibernate 3.6 to Hibernate 5.2, our web framework would sometimes fail mysteriously to bind controller method arguments to the corresponding persistent entity. The cause turned out to be an obscure interaction between JPA’s single table inheritance and a misconfigured Hibernate filter.
Smart Mistakes Are the Worst
Tuesday, May 22 2018 in architecture
When writing bad code, playing smarter sometimes gives the worst results.
How to wrap a web REST API
Wednesday, Apr 4 2018 in java
When calling into a third-party REST API, it’s OK to define high- and low-level operations, and leave out the middle.
Lone Heroes on Software Projects
Sunday, Mar 25 2018
On a software project, communicate to colleagues, managers and clients when you’re in trouble:
Bit Twiddling
Monday, Mar 12 2018 in mathematics
Bit operations preserve De Morgan’s laws. Bit values are sequences of symbols. What makes them behave like booleans? Where does the essence of a boolean lie?
Validate like a Native with React
Sunday, Feb 25 2018 in react javascript
Validating a form doesn’t always require a lot of code. With HTML5 constraint validation, you can describe form validation rules with HTML attributes on the form fields.
For example, to enforce that an
<input>element should not be empty, add therequiredattribute to the element:<input id="name" name="name" required/>You can use HTML5 constraint validation even with React. Let’s look at an example.
How to turn an HTML form into JSON
Saturday, Feb 24 2018 in javascript
To send data from an HTML form to a JSON API, you can extract all the form data in one go with
form-serialize.React and refs, an eternal love story
Tuesday, Feb 20 2018 in react javascript
As in our previous exercise, we want to get the DOM node for a form component to validate the form with the HTML constraint validation API.
Since React 16.3, we can store references to DOM nodes with
React.createRef(). Let’s repeat the exercise with the new API.React, forms and DOM nodes
Monday, Feb 19 2018 in react javascript
To validate a form with the HTML5 constraint validation API you need to call
.checkValidity()on an actual<form>DOM node. With a custom React form component, how would you access the constraint validation API inside a parent component?3 Ways to Fine-tune Presentational Components
Saturday, Feb 17 2018 in javascript react
Here are three ways to make React presentational components work as re-usable building blocks.
React and the mysteries of this
Friday, Dec 1 2017 in react javascript
What’s going on with
thisin JavaScript and what doesbind()do? Let’s explore howthisbehaves in JavaScript and learn why the React documentation recommends callingbind()on some methods in your class component constructors.Introducing React Lifecycle Methods
Wednesday, Nov 1 2017 in react javascript
So-called lifecycle methods come in handy to change the default way React renders elements, like if you want to manipulate the DOM directly or compare the previous and the current props. In this post, we’ll examine three of the most common lifecycle methods. Since you can only use lifecyle methods in class components, let’s remind ourselves the difference between class and function components.
Three Steps to Learn React
Saturday, Sep 16 2017 in react
Have you looked at the React documentation already, but are still confused about how to go about building your first prototype? Try these steps on the path to React mastery.
3 Web Servers for Frontend Developers
Sunday, Sep 10 2017 in javascript
Ever needed to quickly start a web server to check a few scripts you’ve been developing locally? Front-end developers don‘t need long complex set up: they can create an HTML file, include some JavaScript and open the file in the browser. But loading files directly from disk causes a few issues: absolute URLs like /mystyle.css don’t load correctly. And requesting any kind of assets via Ajax calls will fail in Chrome because of cross-origin security policies (scripts aren‘t allowed o load files from your local hard drive).
I did everything right… and npm throws EINTEGRITY errors!
Saturday, Sep 2 2017 in javascript
In my React book, I explain how to download your frontend project dependencies with npm; in this blog post I am going to explain how to recover from an oddball error that I’ve come across once or twice.
Make small React components
Sunday, May 21 2017 in react frontend
The more I experiment with React, the more I find small presentational components are the way to go. Take this markup for a panel component:
Create a Cloudfront distribution for an S3 website
Tuesday, May 9 2017 in devops frontend
The HTTPS protocol encrypts the data between your website and the browser; it makes it harder for third-parties to inject their content into your website and may boost search rankings. You can’t use HTTPS if you’re hosting a website on an S3 bucket on your own domain. To serve your S3 website with HTTPS, one solution is serving your website through the Amazon Cloudfront CDN.