Blog

Two weeks ago, I have started a new project of migrating a large website to React. Although this is not developing from scratch but refactoring, there still was a great chance to reconsider the project file structure in its client part. As a proof-of-concept, I have chosen a pair of components: shopping cart and adding button. This is e-commerce what we are building here :-) My initial goal was to create simple components and demonstrate their reusing as well as introduce Redux as a glue to the components in the data area. As a result, I think I provided a nice and neat structure which helps a…

First thing first, I'm staring weekly posts about findings that are somehow related to work. This is a mature but not yet implemented idea. Although, a friend of mine Vladimir Starkov sometimes practises the same . In this issue there are tips on organizing Google Calendar, nice project management addition for GitHub, Styleguide solutions for React projects and a couple of good reads. Week numbers in Google calendar In Finland, the week numbers are widely used. People easily make agreements on let's say "the beginning on week 45". For this purpose and also for the actual weekly reports, I…

When it comes to the large web applications, we often operate with complex components. Such components are not just CSS styles for the pieces of an interface but also their JavaScript interactions and templates. As documentation, the style guide should reflect them all. In other words, the components on the style guide's pages should be the same living as in production. At my recent project, we have been using SC5 Style Guide in its simplest way - documenting the view of the components. For that, we provided the needed HTML in the KSS code and so has received the rendered component library…

Earlier this year, I participated in a development of a single page application. With the team, we started this project from scratch. This situation was the most suitable to practice the new technologies. The stack I've tried was React + ES2015 + postcss + webpack. However, keeping in mind that most of the team (who were supposed to maintain the project later) are mainly experienced in Angular, I was looking for some sort of combination of these frameworks. Finally, I made a project with React used for the view and Angular governing the data layer. I believe that such project is ideal for the…

Being a frontend developer these days means to learn the new things every day. We read articles and blog posts, examine the changelogs, follow the Twitter announcements and participate in the GitHub discussions. This helps to keep up. However, when it comes to something bigger, like the exploring of a new framework or an ecosystem, it is not enough. The perfect solution is to organize a whole day hackathon for the developers in your company. At SC5 online, we took this advantage mastering the React development. Few ecosystem components such as webpack and redux came along. The private…

My first task for new projects is to create a git repository. Whether it is a new app, or conference slides, or even an article, I prefer to keep everything in Git. It is an excellent tool, and, personally, I enjoy its command line interface. However, there is always room for improvement. Recently I found an idea how to make my git visualize the changes that I've done to the images in a repository. I can run git diff over each of the modified images to see the following: For every picture displayed, I can see a previous version (on the left side), a current version (on the right side) and…