Embed Version Information in Your Dockerized React App

It’s a good idea to have exact version information accessible from within any app you’re building, and it’s easy to put it there with modern tools. Join me for a quick dive through the layers that exist between git and production in a conventional Dockerized React app. Why Show Version Information? There are a bunch […]

How to Encrypt Your Existing AWS S3 Objects

Amazon’s S3 service comes with some pretty handy server-side encryption features. In fact, the S3 web app provides a single control to automatically encrypt all new objects in a bucket with SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS. Unfortunately these controls only affect new objects. If your bucket already contains 10,000 unencrypted objects, then turning on automatic encryption does […]

Getting Familiar with Google Drive File Stream

Google File Stream is one of the better file-syncing solutions that I’ve come across. It’s a great tool for organizations that need to collaborate on projects. Not only does it manage your Google Drive content, but it also works well with Microsoft Office applications like Word and Excel. Today, I’ll show you how to get […]

A Pattern for Type-Safe Redux in TypeScript

I had the pleasure this year of leading an effort to re-write a complex editor application for a manufacturing test environment. The project dealt with highly complex, structured documents, so we felt that Redux would be a great storage solution. During the effort, I was able to refine work I had previously done to provide […]

Ergonomic Struct Updates in Swift

Lately, I’ve been working on a project that employs a Redux-inspired state management architecture built using Swift and SwiftUI. Of course, because of the Redux pattern we employ, we have lots of reducers with the signature (state, action) -> state. All of our states and sub-states are held in Swift structs. The out-of-the-box, value-type semantics […]

How TOTP Systems Like Google Authenticator Work

Over a decade ago, my employer issued me an RSA SecurID token to protect their VPN. This little device had a six-digit LCD display that would roll over to a new random-looking number every minute. I had to add whatever it showed at the moment to my password in order to successfully authenticate. Today, a […]

Getting Create React App & Express to Share Code Without Ejecting (Using Webpack & Typescript)

On a recent project, we used Create React App (CRA) as a starting point. It provides a lot of features out of the box that make starting a new React project a breeze, and it has a community-driven update path. I also wanted to share Typescript code between the front end and back end, something […]

Scrollable Grid with Just-in-Time Data Loading – Part 4: Fetching Data with Apollo Client and GraphQL

Today I’ll explain how to use Apollo Client to fetch data in batches from a GraphQL endpoint and hook that data up to Infinite Loader. By the end of this post, you’ll have an (almost!) full-stack, just-in-time loading list. How did we get here? In my last few posts, I’ve explained how to: Fetch data […]

A Pattern for State Management in React Function Components

When creating a component in React, I often want it to be independent, able to maintain its own state. And at the same time, I’d like its parent to be notified when the component’s state changes, and I want to enable the parent to pass down new state at any time. Implementing this behavior in […]

Better TypeScript Types for Redux Saga’s “Call” Effect

One of the challenges of working with Redux Saga in TypeScript is the heavy and unconventional use of generator functions. This feature from JavaScript does some amazing heavy lifting in enabling the library to be as powerful as it is, but it just doesn’t play well with TypeScript’s capabilities. There’s currently no way to even […]

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