Hack day at our companies seems to have major benefits.What is Hack DayHack Day is a practice of encouraging our employees at our companies to be relieved of the things that they are required to do for a temporary amount of time so that they can do what they want to do.Why would a company do this?Th...

Finding circular dependencies can help you avoid troublesome errors. Find them with this helpful tool, Madge.Definition of a circular dependencyA circular dependency is a clothes dryer that spins and never stops.An ES module might import another module that imports right back to itself.If you have a...

Maybe use just a CSS clip-pathIf you have a simple shape -- like a rectangle or circle -- you can use a simple CSS clip-path attribute. It's fast and easy.But what if you want to create something more complicated like a custom shape, with a bezier curve? clip-path by itself does not handle curves, j...

When marketing ourselves, making a good impression will hinge on doing just a little more.Outrunning a BearIt is said (by obviously sharp people) that to avoid getting mauled by a bear, we don't have to outrun it; we just have to be faster than the other slowest person. It is also said that in order...

I think the cost of supporting Internet Explorer matters. Here are some things we could do if we didn't have IE to support.Why still support itI work for a company and on a product that is fantastic by many standards. But this is not one of its shining points: we still support IE. I write code to ma...

Sometimes you want a React component that can receive a ref from React.forwardRef and also is guaranteed to have a ref if it's not forwarded.Forward a RefIn terms of React 16.x APIs, the only way for a custom component to receive a ref from the outside is via the React.forwardRef API. This can be us...

An .iso file is an image of a bootable disk. If we can can put it on a USB stick, we can boot our computer to that USB stick contents. Here's a way to do that in MacOS.We find ourselves a fresh USB and clear it out. This can be done with the Disk Util.app, built into MacOS. Erase it and format it.Un...

At some point, you may realize that all those packages you're conveniently npm installing are actually causing quite the bloat in your library or your application. Here are some tools that will help you monitor that and find where the size is coming from.I recently discovered this tool called Size L...

Let's say that you do something silly like run a query that hangs and never returns -- or open a transaction but never commit it. Stuff like this could cause a database table lock in Postgres. You need to be able to find those locks, the processes that caused them, and shut them down.Detecting a loc...

When writing integration tests that use a persistent data store, it's important to isolate the tests as much as possible to provide stability in test results.Unit tests are easy to isolate: the test boundary is a function, we call it with arguments and assert the output. Integration tests are more c...

Talking to people is not like talking to machines.Not Only ProgrammersPeople who talk to machines often sometimes need a reminder like this. And when we consider the number of people with a cell phone in their pocket (if we'd leave it in our pocket for 10 seconds) that's pretty much all of us.Here a...

Deploying a static site to Netlify is slick and easy. But if you don't want to transfer your DNS there too, you can keep it on Cloudflare, which does DNS and a whole bunch more.Choose Netlify Site NameOnce you deploy to Netlify, you'll want to edit your Site Name to be something short, memorable, an...

Sometimes consolidation of tech stacks between teams is pushed for. The reasons vary. Here are a few that you hear often but that might not have super-clear payoffs.Easier to Switch Teams?Some would say that consolidating techs makes it easier to switch teams.But when someone switches teams, it's al...

Here's a way to get environment variable values into your Next.js app.Why in the Environment?Why might you want to put variables into the environment? These might be values that are sensitive that you don't want to commit to source control. They might be things that change per environment (staging v...

Vim has a lot of great text editing features built in. But if you want to do anything else to customize it -- and you probably do -- you'll want some Vim plugins, of which there are many. What you may not want is a plugin manager. Neither do I. Here's how to take care of your plugins without a plugi...

Some reasons around why we whitelist props on our shared React components.Whitelist What?In a project I'm on, we're building reusable, shareable React components as a part of a design system.Obviously, each of these components has a public API, accessible via props. Most of these props are purpose-m...

Here's a way to setup webpack to run Svelte component css through postcss.Svelte CSS PreprocessingSvelte is a magical disappearing framework for authoring ui components for the browser. And it took a bit of magic to get preproocessing working right.Svelte takes the approach of web components and pol...

To lock in and remember what we learn, we need to use it.Kinetic LearningSome people learn by doing. From what I can tell, this is largely true for me.For some reason, things seem vague without an application. The information will come into my realm of attention. But there is no mental hook. There i...

The words "thank you" are about the best you can say and hear.A Few Choice WordsAbout the most endearing thing that a small child can say is "thank you". This is especially true for a child that has learned so little else verbally. Of course, they're sweet already as little kids. And they say things...

Gifox is a great tool for recording your screen as a gif on a Mac.Power of an AnimationA picture is worth a thousand words. Put some extra frames in, and multiply the worth. Sometimes an animated gif is awesome to have because it shows an interaction or a progression and not just a static state.When...

Learning to tune things out is important to your joy and progress.Self Aware and PoliteIt seems that we are less self aware these days than ever before. I remember my parents, especially my dad, trying to help me see how we shouldn't impose upon or get in the way of other people. For example, we sho...

Here's how to change a parent element's style when a child element is focused.Parent SelectorIt would be awesome if we could do this in CSS. Alas, there is no parent selector in CSS today. Maybe someday.In CSS, we can style the element itself when it's focused:.element:focus { color: 'thatfocusedcol...

Here's how to adjust the easing function per individual segment of a keyframe animation.Easing into KeyframesIn a keyframe animation, the animation is defined by specifying some key points or frames. The in-between states are calculated automatically. For example, you can define two keyframes, where...

Build your mental stamina to finally solve problems.Amount of EffortHardly anyone will care how much effort it took to solve a problem. They only want it to be solved. In a way, we must be similar in what we care about.We must be able to see the outcome of a solution as the reasont to stick with our...

Start in the job position you want -- it'll be harder to get there later.First Get HereWhen you hiring negotiations, I've heard the invitation a few times -- to myself and to others -- "first get here, then we'll figure that out". If you're starting a job, instead get the position you want when you ...

Define and expose your enum props to make it better for developers.React Component Public APIsWhen you write a component these days, it's usually in a file that acts as a module boundary. You usually end up exporting one thing: the component itself.This might look like:import React from 'react' cons...

Storybook addons need a matching @storybook/addons version. Here's how to ensure it gets it.Addons Need a ChannelIn Storybook, you preview the components you're writing with some nice surround UI to navigate and manipulate them. For this UI to communicate with the preview pane, there is a channel co...

Here's how to install an old, previously-installed brew formula.(tested on Hombrew 1.36)Deprecated: List Available Versions on TapThere used to be a command, brew versions, where you'd try to list the versions of a formula ready to install. If I was looking for hugo versions, I'd type brew versions ...

Webpack's externals property indicates code is available in the runtime environment.Cannot Resolve ModuleIn a recent project, I ran the webpack build and got an error something like:ERROR in ./~/xmlhttprequest/lib/XMLHttpRequest.js Module not found: Error: Cannot resolve module 'child_process' in /U...

The triple dot in JavaScript can be used as a spread operator or in a destructuring assignment.The SyntaxIn the latest versions of JavaScript, the triple dot (or ...) is used as a new syntax for two separate concepts:Spread operationDestructuring assignmentBut because the syntax (at least the ...) i...