Electron will give you a couple ways to open a directory from the filesystem.Note: This article has been substantially updated from Electron 0.37 to Electron 7 architecture and recommendations.1. Easy Street From HTMLIn Electron, you use HTML for your views. Thus, if you want the user to select a di...

Remember that last time that you spoke at a conference and really felt like you had connected with your audience? You were able to keep them with you for the length of your journey. You felt like they grew and were enlightened with you. There's a certain magic to that, and there's also some delibera...

With deep object structures, console.log can leave you wondering what's down in the depths of the objects you're printing out. Here's a quick help from Node stdlib.The Problemconsole.log is nice for printing out the value of an object. But sometimes the object is too "deep" or too nested, and regula...

There are many files that you don't want to store in your project's Git repo. Some of these are even specific to the project. Some are definitely not. How do you ignore these that aren't related to the project?.gitignore For the ProjectIn your project directory, you likely have a .gitignore file. He...

Some have surmised that working more will help their team. It may. It may not. It depends. Here's just one collection of thoughts on how working significantly more than the rest of our team might not help and may actually hinder.What is "More"?Working "more" than the team may mean many things. Perha...

Dan Abramov coined the terms Smart and Dumb components. Later, he called them Container and Presentational components. I still call them Smart and Dumb. It's shorter and sits in my mind easier. How do you identify them? Why would you want a separation? What might that separation look like? Here are ...

We are hiring a bunch of Node.js developers at the moment. You may be as well. I'm sure you have a good list of skills that you're looking for in developers that join your posse. Here are a few technical things I think about when getting the opportunity to sit down with a Node developer.What might y...

In the case where you can't edit a local version of your APIs in order to cause them to fail, you need to be able to edit your client so that it looks like the API request fails. Here's a quick code change that should make this easy for you.This is one of many possible manual testing techniques. Thi...

Stateless React components got a new syntax in React 0.14. It's much simpler. It's just a function call. Besides it just looking simpler, there are some major differences in what is available in a stateless component written this way. There are some things missing -- purposefully not included -- tha...

Debugging in Elm is easy once you know where to look. You need an in-browser tool to help you. It's almost as simple as just calling console.log, but you can't just put your logging statement anywhere.The Online OptionThere's a debugger available online as a part of the elm-lang site at debug.elm-la...

React gives us a great component abstraction. Each of these components represents a node in the DOM. Each component is self contained, doesn't talk up the component hierarchy directly and passes explicit data and code down the hierarchy. But what about when you have a React app that wants to reach o...

It seems to be a recurring discussion in the companies I have worked for: should we use a codename for this project or not? These are software projects. The codenames are used on things as basic as the repository name or slack channel. Later, they might be used in many other project-related things l...

I heard a fantastic yesterday by Glen Maddern where Interoperable CSS was well-illustrated as the fantastic CSS language advancement that it is. I was happy to hear hushed ooo's and ahh's from the audience as they realized the power of what they were seeing. I have been enjoying the benefits of CSS ...

An estuary is where the sea meets the river. Here, there is a mix of fresh water and salt water, sediment from the rivers and marine life from the sea. The effects of both sea and river are seen in many ways. It's a swirl -- there's no upstream or downstream. It's considered to be one of the most nu...

Sometimes it seems like we feel everything we produce must be our magnum opus -- not just great work, but the great work of our career. Somehow we end up thinking that this thing we're working on is the final act, the thing that will dwarf all our previous work. The thing that won't -- in fact, shou...

Do you ever get home and not remember what you did for the whole day at work? You were always on the move. You were always doing something for someone. Obviously you were a much-valued member of the team to have so much required of you. So then why can't you remember what you actually did? And if yo...

You can make some awesome charts in D3. Animate your charts, and they're made even awesomerer. To animate lines, such as those found in line charts, try out the following methods.D3 TransitionIn order to animate in D3, you call the transition function on a d3.selection. The transition essentially cr...

Slack is a fantastic tool. It allows always-on group chat in this spirit of Hipchat or Campfire or your friends' group text thread that just won't end. You can create channels, public or private, to suit your purpose. You can gather communities together to talk about specific things. Slack can becom...

JavaScript's Function object has a very helpful method, bind. It is a great tool to give you control of the ever-squirrely this keyword. Have you ever had trouble predicting what this will be or making equate to what you want? bind will help you do that with more power and consistency. It can also h...

React allows you to create components that will render UI for your application. If your UI is of any complexity, you'll likely want to test that it functions correctly and allows for future refactors. There are numerous ways to do this. One way that you might appreciate is using jsdom, an in-JavaScr...

Webpack has a jolly little server for your development environment called webpack-dev-server. With a touch of configuration, it can be convinced to handle JavaScript history API pushState.webpack-dev-serverWebpack is fast. But once you have a growing number of static assets to process and a increasi...

When there is a new software product to write, there's a decision to be made on what to write it in. In other words, what tech should we use? Technologists have technology they "like". So then, what tech should they choose for the new project? Does it matter what they like?We Like Different TechObvi...

Tools for storing and then later easily running scripts alias names are awesome. Npm is one of those tools. Rake is another. Rake has a cool feature of allowing you to list the scripts available to you. Npm has not -- until now.Npm ScriptsYou can specify scripts in your package.json for later use. T...

I recently had a chance to go through the principles of the 12-Factor App as listed on 12factor.net. It's written by some of the fine folk at Heroku. The principles describe the best practices they see for how to get a modern web app deployed properly. It's a short read. This summary is even shorter...

Testing React Components has been easier and more enjoyable than any previous UI unit testing I've done in the past. Components that have interesting things happen in lifecycle methods have a little more setup to get tested. Components that use the componentWillReceiveProps method are in this catego...

Sinon provides spies, stubs, and mocks. They're all useful as fakes in tests. They come with essential differences for what they're helpful in doing and how they work.Why Use Fakes?In a unit test, you might want to avoid having to test the unit's dependencies. This is especially true in white-box te...

The life of a programmer is mostly a never-ending struggle. Solving problems in an always-changing technical landscape means that programmers are always learning new things. In this case, "learning new things" is a euphemism for "battling against our own ignorance." Even if a programmer is just fixi...

Ruby's stdlib never ceases to amaze. If you're making a CLI tool in Ruby, your efforts are made more straightforward by the existence of the OptionParser class. Use it, and let happiness fill your heart.We're used to some nice CLI tools these days -- ones that have many useful options that allow for...

Once upon a time, react-router transferred params and query params from the url via props into components. It doesn't happen this way any more. So, let's say you have a need in your component like overriding shouldComponentUpdate in your component which only has access to this.props and this.state. ...

Rack apps are generally straightforward to test because of their very basic public interface. But where do we put specific things, in this case, a cookie for the request, on that env argument it takes? Here's one way.envThe env argument that is sent to #call in a Rack app is an variable that represe...