The professional life of an experienced developer is not all sunshine and roses — I’ve been working for one of the largest software companies in the world for more than a decade. With several hats on my head, I’ve seen many aspects of the business, ranging from rapid cowboy development to impactful acquisitions of competitors and startups. 1. Meetings Most developers I know love their jobs…

A step-by-step guide for creating both the React front-end and our own GraphQL server. — Note: all files (server and front-end) can be found at GitLab. Intro In this article we will: Create our own custom GraphQL server with pagination Create a React front-end with an infinite-scroll component I’ve seen several articles about infinite scrolling in React, but very few go into the details and neither…

Low-level APIs that hook into the styling and layout process of your browser’s rendering engine — Note: The source code for the demo discussed in the second half of this article can be found on GitLab. Intro As I mentioned in my recent article about canvas animation inside React components, I love HTML canvas. So I couldn’t be more excited to learn about the new CSS Houdini…

Data fetching and caching quickly becomes cumbersome and complex without the right tools — Introduction More often than not, our React applications serve the purpose of rendering data sets. Creating components and styling them is one part of the story. But our data needs to come from somewhere. In many cases, we fetch data from an API — whether our own API or a third-party…

Testing code can be intimidating if you don’t know how it works. We will go through the basics — Intro Meet James. James is part of a large development team. He specializes in creating awesome React components, and together with many colleagues, he is building a large frontend. Right now, he is building a brand new button. This button has one important functional requirement: After a user clicks on it…

Indeterminate checkboxes — or, “semi-checked checkboxes” — can be quite a challenge to create and update in tree-structured data lists. A complete guide for creating a solution — As always, you can find all relevant code in my GitLab repository. Maybe you have encountered multi-leveled lists with checkboxes in the wild (see the image above). They can be found at many places and I’ve created several of them during my 20+ years as a developer.

Being a freelance developer is not a career for everyone. You might be a great developer, but do you have all that it takes? — For more than five years I used to work as a freelance programmer. Or a web designer, I called myself back then. I’m talking about a while ago and made great money with it because my skill set was quite rare at the time. During those years I realized something…

Easily authenticate users in your React applications by using the Firebase SDKs — Authenticating users in your applications used to be quite challenging. It was a big security hazard and only the experts would dare to implement and maintain solutions. But nowadays, we don’t have to anymore. There are countless external Identity Providers using secure authentication protocols such as OAuth 2.0 …

A brief history of the progression of web development in the last few decades and how I experienced it as a young developer — I remember the exact location where I connected to the internet for the first time with a dial-up connection as quite a young boy. It must have been around 1993 — the year in which HTML was initially released. The internet was brand new. There were only a handful of…