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Building Resilient React Apps

UIs that are heavily dependent on javascript for rendering views can be prone to crashing when uncaught errors are thrown. React-based applications are no exception. This post aims to provide guidance for building resilient user interfaces by prioritizing error handling with React.   Error Classifications I like thinking about the types of errors that can happen

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Revisiting alternatives to Heroku, Vercel Edition

This post is for folks who are already paying for Heroku but are interested in other options. I recently reviewed alternatives to them after they dropped their free tier late last year. I’ve enjoyed how simple their setup was and the developer productivity I got out of it, especially when working with other devs. But

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New Website

Welcome to my new site! It’s built on top of Gatsby, a static site generator. It uses React, GraphQL, and a special version of markdown called MDX to render the pages you’re reading. MDX is a neat way of mixing React (JSX) and Markdown. I enjoy Markdown for it’s brevity when writing notes or documentation. I enjoy React for managing

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Switching out callbacks with promises in Mongoose

Working with promises and mongoose just became a whole lot easier with the 4.1 release, which added the ability to specify alternative promise libraries. Prior to that, promise support was limited to the mpromise way of using promises. For some folks, including myself, this meant there wasn’t a friendly .catch method available to the promise

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An intro to the OS X command line

This post is inspired by the terrible experiences I had when I first started working in the command line and is hopefully a better introduction to working with it in OS X. Before we go any further, I highly suggest you download and install iTerm2 because the default Terminal.app can be a bit little lacking.

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Swig for Designers

What’s Swig? Swig is a node.js templating engine that includes things like layouts, partials, logic tags and filters out of the box. Simple ingredients to make designing for the web a pleasant experience. Why use Swig over something like handlebars? Well, when I was rebuilding my site in metalsmith with metalsmith-templates, I needed some logic to live in my

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HTML, CSS & Javascript Resources

WARNING: This content is super dated. Every now and then people ask me for links to learn about and stay up to date with frontend development. I put together this list to cover the fundamentals and to offer various ways to learn about each subject. Enjoy! Learn Videos Articles Other Resources Stay Up To Date

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Ironsmith, a yeoman generator for metalsmith

Looking to give metalsmith a try but don’t want to deal with configuration? Try out Ironsmith, a yeoman generator that packages common features for building a blog with metalsmith, gulp, and SCSS. Also included is a beautiful theme ported from Jekyll called pixyll. Check out the live demo here. System Prerequisites Before we go on, you’ll need node.js installed. Check out the

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