I recently discovered an incredibly useful feature in Styled Components that allows sharing blocks of CSS properties between components. Here’s a simple example where I create a variable called sharedProps that is passed into two different components, StyledThis and StyledThat. One thing that I have always found clunky in…

AWS Amplify is a fantastic tool for quickly getting up and running with a full-fledged application. It has the amazing capability to incorporate features such as user Authentication. If you’re using React then you can use the withAuthenticator Higher-Order Component to handle your full-suite of Authentication. As useful as this…

For those of you unfamiliar with D3, it is a visualization library that is most likely behind any impressive web-based graphics you’ve seen on sites such as the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight or Flowing Data. It typically requires direct access to the DOM to make its magic happen. This, of…

This week I’ve decided to step away from my usual venture into the world of Javascript and will delve into an incredibly useful Rails Gem called Active Admin. With just a few simple lines of code you can create an admin route that provides powerful insight into the models and…

This week’s blog is going to be short but sweet. I’m going to walk you through an invaluable feature of VS Code: the ability to create custom user snippets. This is really incredibly simple to do and it will greatly enhance your workflow. If you’re unfamiliar with VS Code it’s…

In my previous post I began to chip away at the molehill of Type Driven Development. I’ll now step over that molehill and on to the mountain that is Test Driven Development. As explained in that post, Test Driven Development is focused around functionality of your code, i.e. when a…

A major overhaul in the world of manufacturing was spawned with the birth of Six Sigma. A statistically-driven approach to Industrial Engineering that focuses heavily on reliability. Engineers realized that there are lots of external conditions that can affect the quality of your product. Components might wear down, machine upgrades…

The two most common data structures in Javascript, as in most languages, are objects and arrays. Javascript ES6 provides a useful syntax for unpacking objects and arrays into variables with assigned values. I’ll dig into some of those useful patterns here. Let’s start off with arrays. The basic example shown…

React Router is currently at version 4 of its release and is by leaps and bounds the most popular means to scaffolding dynamic routing within React applications. As shown below it has over 33,000 stars on Github, 442 contributors and over 4,000 commits. It’s incredibly active and has fantastic documentation…