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Understanding Web Standards — Shadow DOM and Custom HTML Elements

February 12, 2021

You might already know that frontend development requires just three technologies upon which the entire web is built: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In the not-too-distant past, the feature set of these standards lagged behind the functional wishes of developers and designers. They couldn’t build the web sites they wanted to build with the tools they were given. To work around this, several independent teams each devised their own frameworks to supplement what was officially supported by browsers.

Adding IoT to My Home Office Desk: Part 1

February 9, 2021

In this article, I will show you how I converted my manual hand crank desk into an automated IoT connected desk. I’ll be talking about how to size and pick motors, and how to connect your custom IoT devices to Google using Heroku as a public interface.

How to Quickly Build a Progressive Web App Using Lightning Web Components

February 2, 2021

Earlier this year, a post came out on the Salesforce Developers Blog, entitled “How to Build Progressive Web Apps with Offline Support using Lightning Web Components.” During the post’s discussion about using Lightning Web Components (LWC) to build progressive web apps, it mentioned push notifications. My interest was piqued. How simple would it be to use LWC to build an app for push notifications? It turns out — really simple.

Monitoring Postgres on Heroku

January 29, 2021

In the vast majority of applications, the database is the source of truth. The database stores critical business records along with irreplaceable user data. So it is imperative that developers have visibility into their databases to diagnose and remedy any potential issues before they impact the business. If they don’t, developers will find unexpected bills at the end of the month that they may not understand.

Building a Meme Generator using RedwoodJS

January 26, 2021

When I first heard about RedwoodJS, I thought it was just another front-end JavaScript framework. I wondered whether it would it be like React or more like Angular. As it turned out, I didn’t have a clue what RedwoodJS was, but now I can’t wait to build more projects using it.

Using the Scientific Method to Debug Containerized Applications

November 17, 2020

“It works fine on my machine!” Perhaps the most famous saying in our industry. Even with the advent of containers that provide consistent environments across the SDLC, we still hear developers fall back to this claim when a defect is found. But in the end, if the code doesn’t work in test or production, it doesn’t work—even if it works locally. So as a developer, being able to deep dive into your containerized application to fix the problem—regardless of the environment—is a critical skill we must all learn.

Using Nginx to Customize Control of Your Hosted App

November 10, 2020

Open-source application diversity is both the biggest boon in the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement, and its greatest hindrance to adoption. You don’t always own the application you’re consuming, and it often comes with certain opinions and limitations imposed by the software author—either intentionally or otherwise.

Converting a Kubernetes Fullstack Application to Heroku Containers

November 9, 2020

In the last several years, Google’s Kubernetes project has generated huge buzz. The project has grown and evolved into a titan of the cloud infrastructure world. While it’s a great project and serves many purposes, it remains a complex beast. Even with the managed Kubernetes services from major cloud providers, teams have to maintain complex, interwoven architectures using an ever-expanding cosmos of plugins and paradigm shifts. With such complexity inherent with its flexibility, Kubernetes requires its own set of skills in order to implement, maintain, upgrade, and operate this diverse orchestration ecosystem.

How to Build a Pokedex React App with a Slash GraphQL Backend

November 3, 2020

In this article, we’re going to walk through some of the basic setup for Slash GraphQL and then take a look at how I built a Pokémon Pokédex app with React and Slash GraphQL in just a few hours! Frontend developers want interacting with the backend of their web application to be as painless as possible. Requesting data from the database or making updates to records stored in the database should be simple so that frontend developers can focus on what they do best: creating beautiful and intuitive user interfaces.

You Can Log Better - How to Implement Real-Time Application Monitoring

October 30, 2020

As long as I can remember, I’ve included log messages in my code to provide run-time insight into what the code is really doing. From developers running locally all the way to the eyes of a production support engineer, these extra lines of code are meant to help troubleshoot unexpected scenarios.

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