Published
I want to explain the vegan position and help everyone become more understanding of our outlook. This is not necessarily about convincing you to become vegan but being more aware of your carnist bias.
If you think veganism is a diet choice then please read on.
Published
Git Ease in VS Code aims to improve the Git log view and make connecting documents more discoverable. I will describe the features and list the technologies used to build it.
Published
I’ve built two VS Code extensions and thought it would be good to share my thoughts on the best way to kick start building your first extension. Key topics I will cover here are the basics about the build, unit testing and a publish/deployment pipeline.
Published
There has been plenty of interest in React Suspense with many articles and experimental code snippets to test it out. I thought I would read more about it and give my understanding of why you might want to use it. Below is my summary after reading through the React docs about concurrent mode and Suspense.
Published
Now that I’ve written a lot of posts I thought it would be good to add search functionality. I have created the first iteration of my search, give it a try. You should be able to find it on the left hand side. For context my blog is statically generated using Jekyll meaning every possible page to render is compiled ready to be served as just client-side code HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Essentially no queries to a database are made on request for a page. How can I add dynamic search that content?
Published
Now that React context has become more established in the community we are seeing a lot of great usages of it. Reflecting on a previous post about Higher-order components (HOC) vs Render props, I rarely use HOC and now generally choose between Context or Render props. With the introduction of hooks and in particular useContext hook, React context is more accessible and has become a go-to approach to solving complex state management. However, there are other options to handle these cross-cutting concerns and so we should be clear on why we are using context. Let’s explore why and how to use React context.
Published
I created 
LanceDarkly, a VS Code extension to help make it easy to manage LaunchDarkly toggles without leaving the editor. What are LaunchDarkly toggles? It’s a service which enables a way of remotely managing the visibility of app features. Toggles are especially handy for trunk-based development and continuous deployment practices by enabling engineers to build features without the end-user seeing it. When that feature is ready, the toggle can be switched on to make the feature visible for all. LaunchDarkly toggles have many other options including splitting traffic to provide a way to split test.
Why did I build LanceDarkly?
Published
The browsers are rolling out updates to support more of the latest features of JavaScript defined by ECMAScript technical committee 39. Have you thought about how much can we write today without using an app bundler like Webpack, Rollup.js or Parcel? Below I will go through a few JavaScript features we can use in today’s modern web browser when building a new web app.
Published
There is an issue with unit testing VS Code extensions. The vscode dependency - which is needed to utilise the editor’s features - will error when running unit tests. Essentially it is a third party dependency which is out of your control, so the best thing to do is to mock the API. I will be using Jest and will explain how to use its mocking features to handle the VS Code dependency.
Published
This won’t be a deep dive into unit testing React components but I will present some options for mocking external services. This is seen as good practice at the unit test level, as we don’t want these tests dependant on an external API which will slow the feedback down and make the test fragile. Mocking is typically used quite loosely and there are plenty of nuances when we throw spies and stubs in the mix. However, they do have a particular meaning and they are all placed under the generic term of Test Double as described by Martin Fowler.
Published
In the previous article I talked about security concerns around storing tokens in localStorage. I thought it would be worth exploring how to use HttpOnly cookies when making requests from a React client-side app. This will include making changes to the Apollo Graphql Server to manage cookies from the client. In this post I will go through the changes needed to enable storing JWTs in HttpOnly cookies from sending headers.
Published
This is the continuation of JWT for authentication using Apollo Graphql server and will show an example of how to send JWTs for each request from the client to the GraphQL server, and how to handle updated tokens when a user returns for a new session in the client.
This tutorial will focus on the key features needed to send and receive tokens, meaning there is no complete example output to try at the end. The aim is to help you integrate authentication into your own app.
