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...
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...
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 th...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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 intricate ...
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. Recently...
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 honest, at f...
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...
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...
“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 final ...
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...
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...
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 th...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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 intricate ...
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. Recently...
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 honest, at f...
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...
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...
“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 final ...