When you want to trigger a change in a nested component, just move the :hover higher. Introduction Building my own personal site was a lot of fun because I got to spend time on the little details and subtle touches to give it that little something extra — I know I always appreciate when I see them on other sites. …

With a separate staging table, inserting and updating data in PostgreSQL is straightforward. — Introduction One of the many things I enjoy about working at a startup is the variety of people I get to work with across the company and the interesting problems I get to solve. …

Stop a video playing or animate an element onscreen — the Intersection Observer API is highly versatile. — It’s the small things that matter When dealing with the business of building websites on a daily basis, I can’t help but start to notice that what separates the good sites from the great ones, is that the great ones pay close attention to the small details. Little page animations, a button that disables after form…

We no longer need to bother designers when the SVG’s color is slightly off: just filter it. — Introduction Working with talented designers is such a pleasure as a web developer. Not only do they come up with beautiful layouts for pages and simplify complex concepts into easy to understand visuals, but oftentimes they provide me the opportunity to learn a new web development technique to bring their visions…

Need more than one color of line in a React Leaflet map? Polylines is the solution. — Introduction Last summer, I started working for an Internet of Things startup, Blues Wireless, whose goal is to make IoT development easier by providing prepaid cellular Internet connectivity to any IoT device through the use of a Notecard, which transmits sensor data as JSON to a secure cloud, Notehub. In a…

Setting up protected environment variables for GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows isn’t so tough. — Introduction Earlier this year, my development team and I were in the midst of building a new open source application to help our users get up and running faster with the hardware the Internet of Things (IoT) company I work for, sells. I work for an IoT startup called Blues Wireless…

Array.reduce() is the solution to combine objects that share a key, but not necessarily properties. — Introduction At work recently, I encountered an interesting problem: I needed to merge multiple JavaScript objects together in an array based on their matching keys. It sounds relatively straightforward at first, but there’s more to the story that prevented me using the spread operator or Object.assign() to combine these objects.

Forget `position: absolute` and `position: fixed`, reach for CSS Grid instead. — Introduction Last year I authored a web development course on modernizing enterprise React applications. It was a big undertaking, but I’m proud to have put out a comprehensive guide to show developers just what it takes to build and maintain a large scale, long-running React application: tooling, testing, refactoring, design systems…

Sometimes table columns and cells need data from multiple object properties. — Introduction This past summer, I started working for an Internet of Things (IoT) startup, Blues Wireless, that aims to make IoT development simpler — even when reliable Internet connections are not available. …