Web Development

There’s one JavaScript feature that’s not often talked about but enables heaps of advanced functionality, specifially around streaming data in both frontend and backend codebases. That’s Async Generators. It’s a feature that was first introduced in ES2017/ES8 but remains largely outside the scope of knowledge of many developers. However, if you have an application that deals with streaming data using GraphQL or transferring data over websockets you may have come across generator functions before. ...

Needing a quick-to-prototype developer-friendly platform for my university course, I turned to Cloudflare Workers and Tanstack Start and Query. The task was simple enough; we needed to plan, deploy and showcase a todo app. Outside of functional requirements, it was also essential that everyone in the project was able to collaborate and test the project locally with a wide variety of skill levels and technical abilities. Cloudflare Workers allowed us to achieve that goal in the limited timeframe that we had. It enabled us to do this using a couple of major points: ...

The prevalence of component libraries and an increasingly large ecosystem of tools for building web applications has provided a litany of choices for developers looking to build modern web applications. When I started programming with React a few years ago I began making single page applications using the ever-popular react-router for routing between pages of my application. This didn’t change much as I began to build more complex applications as it scaled well enough for my needs. ...

One of the key challenges in building efficient React applications falls on managing state updates effectively. This is typically the largest problem that occurs when a React application grows in size and complexity. In this post, I’ll explore how incorrectly managed state updates can lead to performance issues and how to mitigate these problems using popular state management libraries and techniques. When you look at a typical React application (not a static website) you will often find that the depth of the component tree can grow very large. A tree with many nested components is the first and most probable cause of performance issues. If any component high up in the tree updates its state every component below it in the tree will re-render as well. If your application performs a lot of operations when a component renders or is re-rendered this can lead to a very sluggish user experience with a single page change causing multiple seconds of lag. ...