The Winter Throat

I like to occasionally write articles about things that pique my interest at work, or opinions that I form over the years.
Fediverse and the new era of social networks

Fediverse and the new era of social networks

🇺🇸 englishJune 2023 (at 33)#technology#society#writing3240 words11 mnto read

The era of social networks I consider myself a child of the internet, in that I discovered it towards the end of my childhood and spent most of my time there during my formative years instead of, you know, outside. Moving from AIM, to forums and IRC – where I met my wife! And then later on as the era of social networks arrived, to Facebook, Twitter and Reddit (yes I skipped a few). Since it began...

Typescript, Vue 3, and strongly typed props

Typescript, Vue 3, and strongly typed props

🇺🇸 englishJune 2022 (at 32)#javascript#writing#technology1119 words4 mnto read

I’ve recently worked on a Vue application after working for a long time with React, and more particularly with React and Typescript. While I felt right at home in Vue 3’s Composition API given how similar it feels to React Hooks, I did miss the ability to easily use Typescript purely for props validation... or so I thought. Options API versus Composition API Now I’ve known for quite some time th...

Cypress or how I learned to stop worrying and love E2E

Cypress or how I learned to stop worrying and love E2E

🇺🇸 englishMay 2021 (at 31)#technology#writing2598 words9 mnto read

Over my career I've dabbled in various forms of testing, both on the back-end and front-end. I've tried various frameworks, experimented with different approaches, types of tests and philosophies, from unit tests to Gherkin behaviour tests to E2E tests with Selenium in the good ol days. And yet despite all this I don't consider myself good at testing, because I can be very lazy and that I tend to...

Querying your Redux store with GraphQL

Querying your Redux store with GraphQL

🇺🇸 englishDecember 2020 (at 30)#react#technology#writing2622 words9 mnto read

Rationale When working in a React application, one pain point that often comes up is Redux . People say that as soon as an application uses it, things quickly get overrun with boilerplate and "wiring" code that ultimately clogs your codebase more than it helps it. This isn't something inherent to Redux but more something to do with the best practices associated with it, and with people misusing ...

Snapshot Through the Heart

Snapshot Through the Heart

🇺🇸 englishJuly 2020 (at 30)#technology#javascript#writing2048 words7 mnto read

While snapshot testing has been around for a while in the form of visual snapshots (used in visual regression testing), it's clear that the introduction of textual snapshots in Jest a few years ago had a big impact on testing, not only in Javascript but in other languages as well. But looking back on what it brought me a few years later I feel rather failed by snapshots. And while most of the blam...

Gatsby and the new era of site generators

Gatsby and the new era of site generators

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2019 (at 29)#technology#react#writing2815 words9 mnto read

Why Gatsby? One of the greatest aspects of modern web development is how modular and composable everything has become. Building an application these days has become a lot like tinkering with building blocks: piecing together packages, APIs, services and so on. Each doing what they do best. We've learned that reinventing the wheel is (often) not the solution and by embracing interoperability we've...

Gotta Go Fast: Reducing friction in everyday work

Gotta Go Fast: Reducing friction in everyday work

🇺🇸 englishOctober 2019 (at 29)#productivity#technology#writing3050 words10 mnto read

It's safe to say programming, and everything around it, evolved tremendously since the Internet's beginnings. If you've ever created a Frontpage website or battled with Dreamweaver and Flash applications you know we've traveled a long way to get where we are now, and all along this way great strides were made to improve how we work. We got better languages, better tools around them, better integra...

Why do we use bad color schemes?

Why do we use bad color schemes?

🇺🇸 englishJuly 2019 (at 29)#technology#writing#learning1615 words5 mnto read

As developers we've grown accustomed to color schemes in our terminals, our editors, our websites. But why do we love them and sometimes prefer some to others? Why do we sometimes use bad color schemes and what makes one?

Chrome alternatives for devs

Chrome alternatives for devs

🇺🇸 englishMarch 2019 (at 29)#technology#writing2555 words9 mnto read

What's up with Chrome? Recently Google has been in the headlines a lot due to an upcoming change affecting Chrome, which you can read about a bit more over here but the gist of it is the following: The proposed design changes would replace the API relied upon by privacy extensions like uBlock and Ghostery with another designed to “diminish the effectiveness of content blocking and ad blocking ex...

Using Prettier in PHP

Using Prettier in PHP

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2018 (at 28)#php#writing#learning#technology1390 words5 mnto read

What is Prettier? Originally from the Javascript ecosystem, if you're not familiar with it Prettier is a code formatter, which means it takes your code, and makes it as its namme indicates prettier . There are a lot of code formatters, and for a lot of languages – even Javascript has quite a few of them. But Prettier is currently one of the most popular code formatters out there and it has sp...

Thread Carefully

Thread Carefully

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2015 (at 25)#technology#php#writing3731 words12 mnto read

As far as I can remember, PHP has always had a terrible reputation at handling very heavy (or asynchronous) tasks. For a long while if you wanted to parallelize long tasks you had to resort to forking through pcntl\_fork which had its own issues, and you couldn’t really handle the results of those tasks properly, etc. As such, a habit has kind of developed where we go straight for more intricat...

Set Blackfire to the Rain

Set Blackfire to the Rain

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2015 (at 25)#technology#php#writing1702 words6 mnto read

If you’ve ever worked on any PHP application, or package, or anything you know that debugging performance issues is hard . There are several ways to ease the pain a little: debug bars, putting timers a bit everywhere. Or if you’re courageous like I was for a long time, you use xdebug snapshots which requires you to configure it, and then parsing the snapshots which takes a long time, etc. Re...

Webpack your Bags

Webpack your Bags

🇺🇸 englishOctober 2015 (at 25)#technology#writing7097 words24 mnto read

By now you’ve probably heard about this new cool tool on the block called Webpack . If you haven’t looked that much into it you’re probably a bit confused by some people calling it a build tool à la Gulp and other people calling it a bundler like Browserify . If on the other hand you have looked into it you’re probably still confused because the homepage presents Webpack as both. To be ho...

Of links, feeds and fever

Of links, feeds and fever

🇺🇸 englishJanuary 2013 (at 23)#technology#productivity#writing1507 words5 mnto read

In my branch there are a lot of things that make it possible to distinguish someone who does his job well from someone who doesn’t. Compliance with norms and standards, the reusability of the code, the consideration of accessibility, and so on. But above all, it is the willingness and ability to update oneself. It is this quality that makes people who are considered very good in their field right...

Redesign of my portfolio

Redesign of my portfolio

🇺🇸 englishDecember 2012 (at 22)#css#technology#javascript#writing2059 words7 mnto read

I have to admit to a rather superficial habit - and perhaps shared by others in my profession - when I start talking to someone who does my job, the first thing I do is click on the link to their site. I look at the sources, and from there criticism comes quickly. It’s not logical I admit it because even if I try to follow very well all the good codes and practices in terms of webdesign, I don’t a...

Version Control

Version Control

🇫🇷 françaisMay 2012 (at 22)#technology#writing2209 words7 mnto read

“If you’re not on Github, you’re essentially unable to participate in the rich open-source community that has arisen around front-end development technologies.” Quand je dis que ma manière de travailler a changé je ne parle pas seulement du résultat final de mon travail mais du processus en lui-même, le workflow . En quelques mots c’est tout ce qui, de l’idée originelle, conduit au résultat fina...

The Winter Throat

Blog

I like to occasionally write articles about things that pique my interest at work, or opinions that I form over the years.
Fediverse and the new era of social networks

Fediverse and the new era of social networks

🇺🇸 englishJune 2023 (at 33)#technology#society#writing3240 words11 mnto read

The era of social networks I consider myself a child of the internet, in that I discovered it towards the end of my childhood and spent most of my time there during my formative years instead of, you know, outside. Moving from AIM, to forums and IRC – where I met my wife! And then later on as the era of social networks arrived, to Facebook, Twitter and Reddit (yes I skipped a few). Since it began...

Typescript, Vue 3, and strongly typed props

Typescript, Vue 3, and strongly typed props

🇺🇸 englishJune 2022 (at 32)#javascript#writing#technology1119 words4 mnto read

I’ve recently worked on a Vue application after working for a long time with React, and more particularly with React and Typescript. While I felt right at home in Vue 3’s Composition API given how similar it feels to React Hooks, I did miss the ability to easily use Typescript purely for props validation... or so I thought. Options API versus Composition API Now I’ve known for quite some time th...

Cypress or how I learned to stop worrying and love E2E

Cypress or how I learned to stop worrying and love E2E

🇺🇸 englishMay 2021 (at 31)#technology#writing2598 words9 mnto read

Over my career I've dabbled in various forms of testing, both on the back-end and front-end. I've tried various frameworks, experimented with different approaches, types of tests and philosophies, from unit tests to Gherkin behaviour tests to E2E tests with Selenium in the good ol days. And yet despite all this I don't consider myself good at testing, because I can be very lazy and that I tend to...

Querying your Redux store with GraphQL

Querying your Redux store with GraphQL

🇺🇸 englishDecember 2020 (at 30)#react#technology#writing2622 words9 mnto read

Rationale When working in a React application, one pain point that often comes up is Redux . People say that as soon as an application uses it, things quickly get overrun with boilerplate and "wiring" code that ultimately clogs your codebase more than it helps it. This isn't something inherent to Redux but more something to do with the best practices associated with it, and with people misusing ...

Snapshot Through the Heart

Snapshot Through the Heart

🇺🇸 englishJuly 2020 (at 30)#technology#javascript#writing2048 words7 mnto read

While snapshot testing has been around for a while in the form of visual snapshots (used in visual regression testing), it's clear that the introduction of textual snapshots in Jest a few years ago had a big impact on testing, not only in Javascript but in other languages as well. But looking back on what it brought me a few years later I feel rather failed by snapshots. And while most of the blam...

Gatsby and the new era of site generators

Gatsby and the new era of site generators

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2019 (at 29)#technology#react#writing2815 words9 mnto read

Why Gatsby? One of the greatest aspects of modern web development is how modular and composable everything has become. Building an application these days has become a lot like tinkering with building blocks: piecing together packages, APIs, services and so on. Each doing what they do best. We've learned that reinventing the wheel is (often) not the solution and by embracing interoperability we've...

Gotta Go Fast: Reducing friction in everyday work

Gotta Go Fast: Reducing friction in everyday work

🇺🇸 englishOctober 2019 (at 29)#productivity#technology#writing3050 words10 mnto read

It's safe to say programming, and everything around it, evolved tremendously since the Internet's beginnings. If you've ever created a Frontpage website or battled with Dreamweaver and Flash applications you know we've traveled a long way to get where we are now, and all along this way great strides were made to improve how we work. We got better languages, better tools around them, better integra...

Why do we use bad color schemes?

Why do we use bad color schemes?

🇺🇸 englishJuly 2019 (at 29)#technology#writing#learning1615 words5 mnto read

As developers we've grown accustomed to color schemes in our terminals, our editors, our websites. But why do we love them and sometimes prefer some to others? Why do we sometimes use bad color schemes and what makes one?

Chrome alternatives for devs

Chrome alternatives for devs

🇺🇸 englishMarch 2019 (at 29)#technology#writing2555 words9 mnto read

What's up with Chrome? Recently Google has been in the headlines a lot due to an upcoming change affecting Chrome, which you can read about a bit more over here but the gist of it is the following: The proposed design changes would replace the API relied upon by privacy extensions like uBlock and Ghostery with another designed to “diminish the effectiveness of content blocking and ad blocking ex...

Using Prettier in PHP

Using Prettier in PHP

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2018 (at 28)#php#writing#learning#technology1390 words5 mnto read

What is Prettier? Originally from the Javascript ecosystem, if you're not familiar with it Prettier is a code formatter, which means it takes your code, and makes it as its namme indicates prettier . There are a lot of code formatters, and for a lot of languages – even Javascript has quite a few of them. But Prettier is currently one of the most popular code formatters out there and it has sp...

Thread Carefully

Thread Carefully

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2015 (at 25)#technology#php#writing3731 words12 mnto read

As far as I can remember, PHP has always had a terrible reputation at handling very heavy (or asynchronous) tasks. For a long while if you wanted to parallelize long tasks you had to resort to forking through pcntl\_fork which had its own issues, and you couldn’t really handle the results of those tasks properly, etc. As such, a habit has kind of developed where we go straight for more intricat...

Set Blackfire to the Rain

Set Blackfire to the Rain

🇺🇸 englishNovember 2015 (at 25)#technology#php#writing1702 words6 mnto read

If you’ve ever worked on any PHP application, or package, or anything you know that debugging performance issues is hard . There are several ways to ease the pain a little: debug bars, putting timers a bit everywhere. Or if you’re courageous like I was for a long time, you use xdebug snapshots which requires you to configure it, and then parsing the snapshots which takes a long time, etc. Re...

Webpack your Bags

Webpack your Bags

🇺🇸 englishOctober 2015 (at 25)#technology#writing7097 words24 mnto read

By now you’ve probably heard about this new cool tool on the block called Webpack . If you haven’t looked that much into it you’re probably a bit confused by some people calling it a build tool à la Gulp and other people calling it a bundler like Browserify . If on the other hand you have looked into it you’re probably still confused because the homepage presents Webpack as both. To be ho...

Of links, feeds and fever

Of links, feeds and fever

🇺🇸 englishJanuary 2013 (at 23)#technology#productivity#writing1507 words5 mnto read

In my branch there are a lot of things that make it possible to distinguish someone who does his job well from someone who doesn’t. Compliance with norms and standards, the reusability of the code, the consideration of accessibility, and so on. But above all, it is the willingness and ability to update oneself. It is this quality that makes people who are considered very good in their field right...

Redesign of my portfolio

Redesign of my portfolio

🇺🇸 englishDecember 2012 (at 22)#css#technology#javascript#writing2059 words7 mnto read

I have to admit to a rather superficial habit - and perhaps shared by others in my profession - when I start talking to someone who does my job, the first thing I do is click on the link to their site. I look at the sources, and from there criticism comes quickly. It’s not logical I admit it because even if I try to follow very well all the good codes and practices in terms of webdesign, I don’t a...

Version Control

Version Control

🇫🇷 françaisMay 2012 (at 22)#technology#writing2209 words7 mnto read

“If you’re not on Github, you’re essentially unable to participate in the rich open-source community that has arisen around front-end development technologies.” Quand je dis que ma manière de travailler a changé je ne parle pas seulement du résultat final de mon travail mais du processus en lui-même, le workflow . En quelques mots c’est tout ce qui, de l’idée originelle, conduit au résultat fina...