Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My recent huge project was developing a library of CSS and JavaScript components for sharing this code across a lot of web services and mobile apps. In most cases such work brings up question about how to avoid blocking the processes. The library has its own flow, and obviously the new things can only appear in new versions. Although I made my best to provide fast releases, and so the library has them 2-3 times a week, it is still understandable that the library customers sometimes cannot wait even an hour. I belive that one of the must-haves of UI library is the freedom which it should give to its customers. You can easily provide this if practice atomic approach everythere. For example, for the icon fonts.