React Helsinki August 2018 meetup was hosted by Smartly.io at their office in Postitalo next to the Central Railway Station. Here’s my short notes from the event. To follow the community, React Helsinki has also a Facebook group.
The meetup started with Splitting React codebases for increased development speed by Hugo Kiiski from Smartly.io. He told how their Video Editor component is separated from main frontend. Code is in monorepo managed by Lerna. More tools going to be splitted. The recording of the presentation can be seen on Vimeo. (Twitter)
Splitting React codebases for increased development speed
Second topic was live coding and Making your own Ignite generator – for React Native by Toni Ristola from Gofore. It’s useful e.g. if you do many projects in a year. The recording of the presentation can be seen on Vimeo. (Twitter)
When to use generator
Why build your own
Use GraphQL! by Mikhail Novikov showed a quick intro to GraphQL, covered the current state of its adoption and described several ways of how to move to GraphQL. GraphQL “fills the gap between client and server developer needs and values. Matching server capabilities with client requirements.” GraphQL clients to use are i.a. Apollo and Relay. See the slides for more information. The recording of the presentation can be seen on Vimeo. (Twitter)
GraphQL parts
GraphQL adoption
As I mentioned the event has hosted by Smartly.io and their office in Postitalo was cosy and had nice demo room for the meetup. Also the food and beverages were nice althought the hamburger patty was a bit too raw.
Summer has turned to Autumn and it begins to show in the weather. Sun is setting earlier and soon it’s dark almost from dawn to dusk, rain clouds are gathering in the sky with cold winds. Good time to stay inside and read some articles and learn new things. Here’s the monthly notes for August.
Issue 33, 28.8.2018
Learning
Elements of Artificial Intelligence free online course
“Do you wonder what AI really means? Are you thinking about the kind of impact AI might have on your job or life? Do you want to understand how AI will develop and affect us in the coming years? Then this is the course for you!”
Microservices and cloud
Docker Pattern: The Build Container
Let’s say that you’re developing a microservice in a compiled language or an interpreted language that requires some additional “build” steps to package and lint your application code. This is a useful docker pattern for the “build” container.
Experiences with running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes
Gravitational CTO, Sasha Klizhentas, tells about his experience running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. The challenges involved, open source and commercial tools that can help and other alternatives to managing stateful applications on Kubernetes.
Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly (It’s Mostly Good)
Deps developer tells his thoughts about Google Cloud Platform and splits them into good, meh, bad, ugly, and opportunities for improvement. He compares and contrasts with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the other hosting provider that he has the most experience with, and GCP’s biggest competitor.
Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar
Segment’s story of going to microservices architecture and back. “When deciding between microservices or a monolith, there are different factors to consider with each. In some parts of our infrastructure, microservices work well but our server-side destinations were a perfect example of how this popular trend can actually hurt productivity and performance. It turns out, the solution for us was a monolith.”
Have you ever needed to generate a random number in code?
Have you ever needed to generate a random number in code? whether it’s for rolling a dice, or shuffling a set, this tweet thread is here for you! There’s no reason that it should be easy or obvious, very experienced programmers repeat common mistakes. I did, before I learned … from (@colmmacc)
Tools of the trade
Semantic Commit Messages
See how a minor change to your commit message style can make you a better programmer. Format: <type>(<scope>): <subject>. <scope> is optional.
Something different
The Psychology of Money “Let me tell you the story of two investors, neither of whom knew each other, but whose paths crossed in an interesting way.”
Summer season is heating up and here’s the monthly notes for July. Something about JavaScript, little bit of design, touch of privacy and tools of the trade.
Issue 32, 23.7.2018
JavaScript
Defining Component APIs in React
Collects some of the best practices for working with React. “The following is a collection of thoughts, opinions, and advice for defining component APIs that are meant to be more flexible, composable, and easier to understand. None of these are hard-and-fast rules, but they’ve helped guide the way I think about organizing and creating components.” (from Weekend reading)
TIL: node-jsmin (port of Crockford’s JSMin) was dropped from a lot of places as modified MIT license with “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” is not compliant with definition of open source software which doesn’t permit any restriction on how software may be used. (from @walokra)
Microservices
Introducing Jib — build Java Docker images better
“Jib, an open-source Java containerizer from Google that lets Java developers build containers using the Java tools they know. Jib is a fast and simple container image builder that handles all the steps of packaging your application into a container image. It does not require you to write a Dockerfile or have docker installed, and it is directly integrated into Maven and Gradle.”
Design
Brutalist Web Design
TL;DR; Content is readable on ~all screens & devices. Only hyperlinks & buttons respond to clicks. Hyperlinks are underlined, buttons are buttons. Back button works. View content by scrolling. Decoration when needed and no unrelated content. Performance is a feature. (from @walokra)
Little known trick: the <script> tag in html runs the code inside, and also hides it using css display:none. But I can change that to display:block, so that I can show sample code to the reader and also run it on the page to generate diagrams. (need to test across browsers). This also applies to <style> tags, where you can also use contentEditable to create a live editable css of the page you are on. (from @ Amit Patel)
Browsh
Terminal-based web browser renders everything a modern browser can (HTML5, CSS3, JS, video, even WebGL). Use case: run the browser in a data center with fast internet, and access it over SSH from a device that has slow/limited internet. (from Weekend reading)
“petition to make “paste and match formatting” the default paste option”
Privacy
Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat
Riot Games published an article about their anti-cheating methods – nothing really fancy or new but, in the Hacker News thread there was an interesting comment by a cheat writer:
“The current Mac game client for League Of Legends contains full debug symbols and it doesn’t have Packman (the packer described in this article), which makes it quite easy to look through the symbols. Inside you can find all of the anti-cheat-related network packets. Now, I personally expect anti-cheat to snoop around my system when I’m doing something shady like scanning its memory. However, if I was a normal user of the game, I would be a bit concerned to know that it might be sending my recently used file names, drive names, system driver names, currently running processes, processor information, system state, and even entire binary files that it automatically deems as “suspicious”, to their servers.”
@aral and maya kosoff: “X is a service that enables you to control articles presented to your wife on the websites she usually visits, in order to influence her on a subconscious level to initiate sex. The best bit? It’s “just” adtech. It’s retargeting. It’s how Google makes money.” Also suggested use cases are “get your kid a dog” or “stop drinking” which eems to open up a whole new acquaintance micromarketing concept. Makes you think how you’re influenced and by whom.
@dhh
“Imgur’s fake adherence to GDPR is exactly the kind of transgression that should trigger those multi-million euro fines. There are literally HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of shady services getting your data. Only bulk link is to ALLOW ALL, which is also default. Tons you can’t opt-out. ?”
Something different
StemCAPtain
“The StemCAPtain replaces the stem cap, aka top cap, piece of a threadless 1″ or 1 1/8″ headset with different functional accessories. In addition to the simple and elegant analog clock, we offer a thermometer, bottle opener, picture frame, compass, GPS mount, and USB charger”
Writing documentation is always a task which isn’t much liked and especially with diagrams and flowcharts there’s the problem of which tools to use. One crafty tool is Draw.io with web and desktop editors but what to use if you want to write documentation as a code and see the changes clearly in text format and maintain source-controlled diagrams? One of the tools for drawing diagrams with human readable text are mermaid and PlantUML.
mermaid
“Generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text in a similar manner as markdown.”
mermaid is a simple markdown-like script language for generating charts from text via javascript. You can try it in live editor.
mermaid sequence diagram
You can write mermaid diagrams in text editor but it’s better to use some editor with plugins to preview your work. Markdown Preview Enhanced for Atom and VS Code can render mermaid and PlantUML. There’s also dedicated preview plugins for VS Code and Atom.
To preview mermaid definition in VS Code with Markdown Preview Enhanced press Cmd-P to open Command palette and select Markdown Preview Enhanced: Open Preview.
mermaid in VS Code with Markdown Preview Enhanced
To preview mermaid definition in VS Code with Mermaid Preview press Cmd-P to open Command palette and select Preview Mermaid Diagram.
mermaid in VS Code with Mermaid preview
Generating PNG images from mermaid definitions
To use mermaid diagrams it’s useful to export them to PNGs. You can use mermaid.cli tool which takes a mermaid definition file as input and generates svg/png/pdf file as output.
If you have plenty of defition files you can use the following script to generate PNGs:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
for mmd in ./docs/*.mmd
do
filename="${mmd##*/}"
echo "Generating $mmd"
./node_modules/.bin/mmdc -i $mmd -o ${filename%%.*}.png
done
#!/usr/bin/env bash
for mmd in ./docs/*.mmd
do
filename="${mmd##*/}"
echo "Generating $mmd"
./node_modules/.bin/mmdc -i $mmd -o ${filename%%.*}.png
done
Alternatively you can use node_modules/mermaid/bin/mermaid.js $mmd where mmd is the mermaid file.
PlantUML diagrams
PlantUML is used to draw UML diagrams, using a simple and human readable text description.
PlantUML is used to draw UML diagrams, using a simple and human readable text description. Diagrams are defined using a simple and intuitive language (pdf) and images can be generated in PNG, in SVG or in LaTeX format.
You can use PlantUML to write e.g. sequence diagrams, usecase diagrams, class diagrams, component diagrams, state diagrams and deployment diagrams.
To preview PlantUML diagram in VS Code with Markdown Preview Enhanced press Cmd-P to open Command palette and select Markdown Preview Enhanced: Open Preview.
PlantUML in VS Code with Markdown Preview Enhanced
There’s an online demo server which you can use to view PlantUML diagrams. The whole diagram is compressed into the URL itself and diagram data is stored in PNG metadata, so you can fetch it even from a downloaded image. For example this link opens the PlantUML Server with a simple Authentication activity diagram.
Running PlantUML server locally
Although you can render PlantUML diagrams online it’s better for usability and security reasons to install a local server. And this approach is important if you plan to generate diagrams with sensitive information. The easiest path is to run PlantUML Server Docker container and configure localhost as server.
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 plantuml/plantuml-server:jetty
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 plantuml/plantuml-server:jetty
In VS Code config, open user setting, and configure like:
Now to preview diagram in VS Code press alt-D to start PlantUML preview.
PlantUML preview in VS Code and local server
You can also generate diagrams from the command line. First download PlantUML compiled Jar and run the following command which will look for @startXXX into file1, file2 and file3. For each diagram, a .png file will be created.
java -jar plantuml.jar file1 file2 file3
java -jar plantuml.jar file1 file2 file3
The plantuml.jar needs Graphviz for dot (graph description language) and on macOS you can install it from Homebrew: brew install graphviz.
For processing a whole directory, you can use the following command which will search for @startXXX and @endXXX in .c, .h, .cpp, .txt, .pu, .tex, .html, .htm or .java files of the given directories:
java -jar plantuml.jar "directory1" "directory2"
java -jar plantuml.jar "directory1" "directory2"
Maintain source-controlled diagrams as a code
Documentation and drawing diagrams can be simple and maintaining source-controlled diagrams with tools like PlantUML and mermaid is achievable. These tools are not like the behemoth of Sparx Enterprise Architect but provide light and easy way to draw different diagrams for software development. You don’t have to draw lines and position labels manually as they are magically added where they fit and you even get as crude boxes and squares as thousands of dollars more expensive tools. Now the question is which tool to choose: PlantUML or mermaid?
The first part of Summer has been great and holiday season is near. Here’s monthly notes for June with topics of microservices, kubernetes, design patterns and stories of how Shopify and Airbnb build their services. Also some tools like Kap. Happy reading.
Issue 31, 28.6.2018
Microservices
7 tips for effective microservices
“Have a request-id/correlation-id for every request, Maintain backward compatibility of interfaces, Have a centralized logging system, Implement idempotency and retries, Be aware of language constraints, Have a single service to manage the system state, Strike a balance between in-memory-data and db persistence” (from The Microservice Weekly)
Kubernetes
AWS Workshop for Kubernetes
“Self-paced workshop designed for Development and Operations teams who would like to leverage Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services (AWS).”
Kubernetes best practices: terminating with grace
“This episode of “Kubernetes Best Practices,” let’s take a look at how you can help Kubernetes do its job more efficiently and reduce the downtime your applications experience.”
xcprojectlint: A security blanket for Xcode project files
Would you like to automate some consistency in your Xcode project files with checks for settings defined at the project level (rather than in an xcconfig), missing files and empty file groups? This tool does exactly that, and more. Also, I like the way it’s described: “Provides a security blanket, ensuring neither your co-workers, nor git screw up your Xcode project file.” (from iOS Dev Weekly 353)
Shopify Infrastructure with Niko Kurtti
“Shopify has built its own platform-as-a-service on top of Kubernetes called Cloudbuddies. Niko Kurtti is a production engineer at Shopify joins the Software Engineering Daily show to describe Shopify’s infrastructure – how they run so many stores, how they distribute those stores across their infrastructure, and the motivation for building their own internal platform on top of Kubernetes.”
Building Services at Airbnb, Part 1
The first in a series on scaling service development, this article looks at the core structure, the Service IDL, underpinning the new Services Oriented Architecture at Airbnb.
Building Services at Airbnb, Part 2
The second in a series on scaling service development, this article looks at some of the key tooling that supports the new Services Oriented Architecture at Airbnb.
Awesome design patterns
A curated list of software and architecture related design patterns. Software design pattern – A general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.
Something Different
Cool Backgrounds
Collection of tools to create compelling, colorful images for blogs, social media, and websites. Beyond backgrounds, the images generated can be used as ? desktop wallpapers or cropped for ? mobile wallpapers.
OWASP Helsinki Chapter held a meeting number 34 last week at Eficode with topics of
“Perfectly secure API” and “Best friends: API security & API management”. The event gave good overview to the topics covered and was quite packed with people. Eficode’s premises were modern and there was snacks and beverages. And also a sauna. Here is a short recap of the talks.
OWASP Helsinki Chapter Meeting 34
Perfectly secure API
Matti Suominen from Nixu talked about perfectly secure API and things related to get there. Can API be secure? On gut feeling APIs seems to be rubbish and have problems. He covered the topic from three view points: security, risks and defense. Good starting point is to read OWASP resources like ASVS, Top 10 and Security cheat sheet. Also implement security centrally, involve business in design and DIY never works out.
Antti Virtanen from Solita talked about API security and API management and how we’ve traveled from dark ages to modern times. You can do API security with tools like Amazon AWS API Gateway but the main point was to step further with API management. Use some already made products like Apigee and open source alternative Tyk.io. Slides are available in Slideshare.
From dark ages to modern ages and better API security with #API management as @anakonantti from @SolitaOy showed at #OWASPHelsinki meetup. #Apigee is one solution. Step further from API gateway, adds DX and publishing tools. Open source alternative is @tyk_io but it’s complex. pic.twitter.com/re69veD9bx
Summer is approaching and even in Finland the weather is sunny and warm. I’ve been busy as the Enduro-MTB racing season has started and most weekends are spent at the race track. But here’s monthly notes for May with topics of state of the Web, how geolocation in browsers work, and something about tools. Happy reading.
Ever stop to think about geolocation in your desktop browser?
tl;dr; location is triangulated by location services like Mozilla & Google from scan of nearby Wi-Fi access points’ signal strength and their known locations. List is collected when people walk with a phone with GPS and Wi-Fi on which polls networks. (from @walokra)
Is GraphQL The Future?
If you are not sold on GraphQL then this post might tip you over the edge. Alan Johnson does a great job in explaining the awesomeness that GraphQL has to offer. (from Web Design Weekly 321)
Tools for making HTTP requests
Imsomnia
Powerful HTTP and GraphQL tool belt. Debug APIs like a human, not a robot. Finally, a REST client you’ll love.
RESTed – Simple HTTP Requests
RESTed allows developers to quickly format and make HTTP requests and view the response. For Mac.
Paw
Paw is a full-featured HTTP client that lets you test and describe the APIs you build or consume. It has a beautiful native macOS interface to compose requests, inspect server responses, generate client code and export API definitions.
Security
US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data
Intriguing thoughts: “Access to your real-time phone location data is sold to companies and public has zero idea how much personal location data is available. It is done throughout the industrialized world to varying degrees.” e.g. stocks are traded based on where peoole go. (from @walokra)
JavaScript
`npm audit`: identify and fix insecure dependencies
“npm audit is a new command that performs a moment-in-time security review of your project’s dependency tree. Audit reports contain information about security vulnerabilities in your dependencies and can help you fix a vulnerability by providing simple-to-run npm commands and recommendations for further troubleshooting.” (from JavaScript Daily)
JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures
A wide variety of algorithms (e.g. permutations, Levenshtein distance, binary search) and data structures (e.g. linked lists, trees, stacks) implemented in JavaScript with explanations and links to further reading. (from JavaScript Weekly 387)
Unchained: A story of love, loss, and blockchain
> It was a smart contract that stipulated sexual fidelity and parental responsibilities. Tokens from their joint earnings paid the AI judges and IoT sensor oracles that monitored contract violations. On mornings like this, you really needed commitment that was mathematically provable, not just an empty promise at the altar.
React Finland 2018 conference was held last week and I had the opportunity to attend it and listen what’s hot in the React world. The conference started with workshops and after that there was two days of talks of React, React Native, React VR and all things that go with developing web applications with them. The two conference days were packed with great talks and new information. This is the second part of my recap of the talks and my notes which I posted to Twitter. Check out also the first part of my notes from the first day’s talks.
React Finland 2018, Day 2
How React changed everything — Ken Wheeler
Second day started with keynote by Ken Wheeler. He examined how React changed the front end landscape as we know it and started it with nice time travel to the 90s with i.a. Flash, JavaScript and AngularJS. Most importantly the talk took a look at the core idea of React, and why it transcends language or rendering target and posit on what that means going forward. And last we heard about what React async: suspense and time slicing.
“Best part of React is the community”
How React changed everything
Get started with Reason — Nik Graf
The keynote also touched Reason ML and Nik Graf went into details kicking off with the basics and going into how to leverage features like variant types and pattern matching to make impossible states impossible.
Get started with Reason ML
Making Unreasonable States Impossible — Patrick Stapfer
Based on “Get started with Reason” Patrick Stapfer’s talk went deeper into the world of variant types and pattern matching and put them into a practical context. The talk was nice learning by doing TicTacToe live coding. It showed how Reason ML helps you design solid APIs, which are impossible to misuse by consumers. We also got more insights into practical ReasonReact code. Presentation is available on the Internet.
Conclusion about ReasonReact:
More rigid design
More KISS (keep it simple, stupid) than DRY (don’t repeat yourself)
Forces edge-cases to be handled
Learning Reason by doing TicTacToe
Reactive State Machines and Statecharts — David Khourshid
David Khourshid’s talk about state machines and statecharts was interesting. Functional + reactive approach to state machines can make it much easier to understand, visualize, implement and automatically create tests for complex user interfaces and flows. Model the code and automatically generate exhaustive tests for every possible permutation of the code. Things mentioned: React automata, xstate. Slides are available on the Internet.
“Model once, implement anywhere” – David Khourshid
The talk was surprisingly interesting especially for use cases as anything to make testing better is good. This might be something to look into.
Compelling use case for state machines is: model code & automatically generate exhaustive tests for every possible permutation of the code. @DavidKPiano and surprisingly interesting talk of Reactive State Machines and Statechart at #ReactFinland. "Model once, implement anywhere" pic.twitter.com/v5iynBA4te
After theory heavy presentations we got into more visual stuff: React VR. Shay Keinan presented the core concepts behind VR, showed different demonstrations, and how to get started with React VR and how to add new features from the Three.js library. React VR: Three.js + React Native = 360 and VR content. On the VR device side it was mentioned that Oculus Go, HTC Vive Focus are the big step to Virtual Reality.
“Virtual Reality’s possibilities are endless. Compares to lucid dreaming.” – Shay Keinan
WebVR enables web developers to create frictionless, immersive experiences and we got to see Solar demo and Three VR demo which were lit ?.
React VR
World Class experience with React Native — Michał Chudziak
I’ve shortly experimented with React Native so it was nice to listen Michał Chudziak’s talk how to set up a friendly React Native development environment with the best DX, spot bugs in early stage and deliver continuous builds to QA. Again Redux was dropped in favour of apollo-link-state.
Work close to your team – Napoleon Hill
What makes a good Developer eXperience?
stability
function
clarity
easiness
GraphQL was mentioned to be the holy grail of frontend development and perfect with React Native. Tools for better developer experience: Haul, CircleCI, Fastlane, ESLint, Flow, Jest, Danger, Detox. Other tips were i.a to use native IDEs (XCode, Android Studio) as it helps debugging. XCode Instruments helps debug performance (check iTunes for video) and there’s also Android Profiler.
World Class experience with React Native
React Finland App – Lessons learned — Toni Ristola
Every conference has to have an app and React Finland of course did a React Native app. Toni Ristola lightning talked about lessons learned. Technologies used with React Native was Ignite, GraphQL and Apollo Client ? App’s source code is available on GitHub.
Lessons learned:
Have a designer in the team
Reserve enough time — doing and testing a good app takes time
Test with enough devices — publish alpha early
React Finland App – Lessons learned
React Native Ignite — Gant Laborde
80% of mobile app development is the same old song which can be cut short with Ignite CLI. Using Ignite, you can jump into React Native development with a popular combination of technologies, OR brew your own. Gant Laborde talked about the new Bowser version which makes things even better with Storybook, Typescript, Solidarity, mobx-state-tree and lint-staged. Slides can be found on the Internet.
Ignite
How to use React, webpack and other buzzwords if there is no need — Varya Stepanova
Varya Stepanova’s lightning talk suggested to start a side-project other than ToDo app to study new development approaches and showed what it can be in React. The example was how to generate a multilingual static website using Metalsmith, React and other modern technologies and tools which she uses to build her personal blog. Slides can be found on the Internet.
Doing meaningful side-projects is a great idea to study new things and I’ve used that for i.a. learning Swift with Highkara newsreader, did couple of apps for Sailfish OS and played with GraphQL and microservices while developing app with largish vehicle dataset.
Two days full of talks of React, React Native, React VR and all the things that go with developing web applications with them was great experience. Days were packed with great talks, new information and everything went smoothly. The conference was nicely organized, food was good and participants got soft hoodies to go with the Allas Sea Pool ticket. The talks were all great but especially “World Class experience with React Native” and “React Native Ignite” gave new inspiration to write some app. Also “ReactVR” seemed interesting although I think Augmented Reality will be bigger thing than Virtual Reality. It was nice to hear from “The New Best Practices” talk that there really is no new best practices as the old ones still work. Just use them!
Something to try and even to take into production will be Immer, styled components and Next.js. One thing which is easy to implement is to start using lint-staged although we are linting all the things already.
One of the conference organizers and speaker, Juho Vepsäläinen, wrote Lessons Learned from the conference and many of the points he mentions are to the point. The food was nice but “there wasn’t anything substantial for the afternoon break”. There wasn’t anything to eat after lunch but luckily I had own snacks. Vepsäläinen also mentions that “there was sometimes too much time between the presentations” but I think the longer breaks between some presentations were nice for having a quick stroll outside and have some fresh air. The venue was quite warm and the air wasn’t so good in the afternoon.
The Afterparty at Sea Life Helsinki was interesting choice and it worked nicely although there wasn’t so many people there. The aquarium was fishy experience and provided also some other content than refreshments. Too bad I hadn’t have time to go and check the Allas Sea Pool which we got a free ticket. Maybe next time.
Thanks to the conference crew for such a good event and of course to my fellow Goforeans which attended it and had a great time!
React Finland 2018 conference was held last week and I had the opportunity to attend it and listen what’s hot in the React world. The conference started with workshops and after that there was two days of talks of React, React Native, React VR and all things that go with developing web applications with them. The two conference days were packed with great talks and new information. Here’s the first part of my notes from the talks which I posted to Twitter. Read also the second part with more of React Native.
React Finland 2018: Day 1
React Finland combined the Finnish React community with international flavor from Jani Eväkallio to Ken Wheeler and other leading talents of the community. The event was the first of its kind in Finland and consisted of a workshop day and two days of talks around the topic. It was nice that the event was single track so you didn’t need to choose between interesting talks.
At work I’ve been developing with React couple of years and tried my hands with React Native so the topics were familiar. The conference provided crafty new knowledge to learn from and maybe even put to production. Overall the conference was great experience and everything went smoothly. Nice work from the React Finland conference team! And of course thanks to Gofore which sponsored the conference and got me a ticket.
I tweeted my notes from almost every presentation and here’s a recap of the talks. I heard that the videos from the conference will be available shortly.
The New Best Practices — Jani Eväkallio
First day’s keynote was by Jani Eväkallio who talked about “The New Best Practices”. As the talk description wrote “When React was first introduced, it was ridiculed for going against established web development best practices as we knew them. Five years later, React is the gold standard for how we create user interfaces. Along the way, we’ve discovered a new set of tools, design patterns and programming techniques.”
The new best practices were:
Build big things from small things
Write code for humans first: flow, Typescript, storybook
Stay close to the language:
helps i.a. linters
Always prefer simplicity
Don’t break things:
Facebook makes React API changes easy to upgrade, depreciation well in advance, migration, documentation. it’s a flow, not versions. Use codemod.
Keep an open mind
You ask “what new best practices”? Yep, that’s the thing. We don’t need new best practices as the same concepts like Model-View-Controller and separation of concerns are still valid. We should use best practices which have been proved good before as they also work nicely with React philosophy. Eväkallio also talked why React will be around for a long time. It’s because components and interoperable components are an innovation primitive.
The New Best Practices
Declarative state and side effects — Christian Alfoni
Immutable data structures are a good thing and Michel Weststrate showed Immer which is a tiny package that allows you to work with immutable data structures with unprecedented ease. Managing the state of React app is a huge deal with Redux and any help is welcome. “Immer doesn’t require learning new data structures or update APIs, but instead creates a temporarily shadow tree which can be modified using the standard JavaScript APIs. The shadow tree will be used to generate your next immutable state tree.”
The talk showed how to write your reducers in a much more readable way, with half the code and without requiring additional large libraries. The talk slides are available on the Internet.
“Get Rich Quick With React Context” lightning talk by Patrick Hund didn’t tell how good job opportunities you have when doing React But how with React 16.3 the context API has been completely revamped and demonstrated a good use case: Putting ad placements on your web page to get rich quick! Other use cases are localizations. Check out the slides which will tell you how easy it is to use context now and how to migrate your old context code to the new API.
There’s always a better way to handle localization — Eemeli Aro
“There’s always a better way to handle localization” lightning talk by Eemeli Aro told about how localization is a ridiculously difficult problem in the general case, but in the specific you can get away with really simple solutions, especially if you understand the compromises you’re making.
I must have been dozing as all I got was there are also other options to store localizations than JSON like YAML and JavaScript property format especially when dealing with non-developers like translators. The talk was quite general and on abstract level and mentioned solutions to localization were react-intl, react-i18next and react-message-context.
Styled Components, SSR, and Theming — Kasia Jastrzębska
Takeaways from this talk was that CSS in React app can be written as you always have or by using CSS-in-JS solutions. There are several benefits of using styled-components but I’m still thinking how styles get scattered all over components.
Universal React Apps Using Next.js — Sia Karamalegos
53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. – DoubleClick by Google, 2016
Every user’s hardware is different and processing speed can hinder user experience on client-side rendered React applications and so Sia Karamalegos talked how server-side rendering and code-splitting can drastically improve user experience. By minimizing the work that the client has to do. Performance and shipping your code matters. The talk showed how to easily build an universal React apps using the Next.js framework and walked through the concepts and code examples. Talk slides are available on the Internet.
There are lots of old (mobile) devices which especially benefit from Server Side Rendering. Next.js is a minimalistic framework for universal, server-rendered (or statically pre-rendered) React applications which enables faster page loads. Pages are server-rendered by default for initial load, you can enable prefetching future routes and there’s automatic code splitting. It’s also customizable so you can use own Babel and Webpack configurations and customize the server API with e.g. Express. And if you don’t want to use a server Next.js can also build static web apps that you can then host on Github pages or AWS S3.
Universal React apps using Next.js
State Management in React Apps with Apollo Client — Sara Vieira
Apollo Client was one of the most mentioned framework in the conference along with Reason ML and Sara Vieira gave energetic talk how to use it for state management in React Apps. If you haven’t come across Apollo Client it’s caching GraphQL client and helps you to manage data coming from the server. Virieira showed how to manage local state with apollo-link-state.
The talk was fast paced and I somewhat missed the why part but at least it’s easy to setup: yarn add apollo-boost graphql react-apollo. Have to see slides and demo later. Maybe the talk can be wrapped up to: “GQL all the things” and “I don’t like Redux” :D
State Management with Apollo
Detox: A year in. Building it, Testing with it — Rotem Mizrachi-Meidan
Detox testing framework for React Native talk by Rotem Mizrachi-Meidan was the other talk I dozed along. Mizrachi-Meidan talked what developing and using Detox in production has taught and how Detox works and what makes it deterministic. The talk showed how mobile apps could be tested. There’s a video of earlier talk on the Internet.
Detox
Make linting great again! — Andrey Okonetchnikov
One thing in software development which always gets developers to argue over stupid things is code formatting and linting. Andrey Okonetchnikov talked how “with a wrong workflow linting can be really a pain and will slow you and your team down but with a proper setup it can save you hours of manual work reformatting the code and reducing the code-review overhead.”
The talk was a quick introduction how ?? lint-staged a node.js library can improve developer experience. Small tool coupled with tools that analyze and improve the code like ESLint, Stylelint, Prettier and Jest can make a big difference.
Missed talks
There was also two talks I missed: “Understanding the differences is accepting” by Sven Sauleau and “Why I YAML” by Eemeli Aro. Sauleau showed “interesting” twists of Javascript language.
This month’s notes are about front-end technologies: Sneak peek beyound React 16 and videos from Vue and Angular conferences. Also CSS Blocks + OptiCSS is great and for us in EU it’s nice that Fargate is finally available in Ireland. Check also list of important podcasts for software engineers.
Issue 29, 29.4.2018
Security
Computer security principles
One should keep in mind that there’s no such thing as perfect security. To put it another way, a 100% hack-safe systems do not exist. It’s all about the resources attacker(s) have, whether it is money, brain power, or equipment. Security standards and best practices changes quickly and therefore a system built five years ago is not inevitably conforming to current standards. So let’s look at some proactive measures that can be done to harden a system or code.
Cloud
AWS DevDay Munich 2018: Deep Dive into AWS Fargate (video)
“The session covers the state of containerized application development and deployment trends, new container capabilities on AWS that are available now, options for running containerized applications on AWS, and how AWS customers successfully run container workloads in production.” And for us in the EU Fargate is now available in Ireland.
Deploying FARGATE services using CloudFormation
“TL;DR — Deploying Fargate services is not as straight forward as you may think, especially if you’re used to the current EC2 configuration and are now trying to migrate running services. I had to go through a couple of days and few dozens of CloudFormation deployment iterations to figure out my missing / wrong settings before I made it through my first running Fargate container.”
CSS at Scale: LinkedIn’s New Open Source Projects Take on Stylesheet Performance
“TL;DR: CSS Blocks + OptiCSS = :fire: So you get to write component-scoped CSS but end up with globally scoped, browser-friendly and compressed CSS classes (think atomic CSS). CSS Blocks does its magic with statically analyzing your markup and updating it with the new classes. It runs the OptiCSS as well, so you get tree-shaking and dead-code elimination also. Not 100% of the terms here, but basically unused code gets wiped.”
Sneak Peek: Beyond React 16
Intriguing ~30min talk with demos of what the future of React might look like showing off the new capabilities that async rendering unlocks for your components. Time Slicing lets you render and update large React component trees without blocking the user interactions. Suspense lets you render a component tree “in background” while components are fetching data, and display them only after the whole tree is ready. (from Twitter)
Talks from ng-conf 2018
Collection of all lectures that were presented during the conference. Each session includes a concise description and relevant slides.
