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James DiGioia
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Weekly Links - Nov. 25th, 2018

James DiGioia

Transducers in JavaScript Array#reduce is one of those things that can be difficult to develop an intuition for, but if you can, what makes it powerful is how reducers (the function you pass to it) can be composed together. It’s an idea that I keep reading about in an attempt to get my head around […]

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Weekly Links - Nov. 18th, 2018

James DiGioia

More Functional CSS I’ve been rebuilding my site into Gatsby with Tailwind, and I’ve really been quite enjoying it so far. The limitations it imposes force you to limit the amount of CSS you have to write, so I’ve been intrigued to see more articles pop up about it. This article from CSS-Tricks explores whether […]

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Weekly links - Week of Nov 11th, 2018

James DiGioia

Unit Testing When you’re working at a startup, we’re building out new features so fast that we’ve not-irregularly introduced bugs to already-complete parts. We don’t have a dedicated QA team and few tests, and we’re looking to get some backstopping going so we can continue to ship with confidence. While I’m looking at eventually integrating […]

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Array Update Trick: What it is and how it works

James DiGioia

The other day, I was looking at some code that did an immutable update of an array, replacing the value at one index with a new value. It used a slice-based method, which took 2 spreads and several lines of code after prettier was done with it. After looking at it for a bit, I […]

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Weekly Links - Week of Nov 4th, 2018

James DiGioia

This week, I updated my James Reads site to use Gatsby, powered by a combination of Pocket & the WordPress site that currently resides on that domain. I do a lot of reading on Pocket, and I’ve been meaning to figure out a way to display both Pocket- & WP-saved links there. Initially, that was […]

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The Roots team invited me to write a blog post about WP-Gistpen hitting 1.0 (which it finally did recently!). I provide a quick overview of why I built the plugin and what it does. Check it out!

WP-Gistpen: A Gist Clone for WordPress

James DiGioia

Big changes afoot in the React/Redux ecosystem

James DiGioia

If you’re using React and / or Redux, you should be aware of two major changes coming soon in each of those libraries. First, Redux just released v4.0.0-beta.1. There doesn’t appear to be any major changes breaking changes unless you were using some of the types Redux is no longer exporting. There are also some […]

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It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

— Nathaniel Borenstein

James DiGioia

Arrow functions are not the solution you’ve been looking for

James DiGioia

JavaScript’s Arrow functions were supposed to solve all our this-related problems but instead just replaced those this-related problems with other this-related problems. A friend of mine posted this in our local Slack channel, and I’ve seen a variation of this problem a number of times already: Note the <- Fails here. Can you spot why? […]

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I think my favorite thing about Webassembly is the possibility of being able to write both the front- and back-end in a language other than JavaScript. Node is great, but sometimes it’s not the right choice for a particular use case, and being able to choose a language other than JavaScript and still get the kind of isomorphism you get running a V8 instance on a server is amazing.

I also really want to use it as an opportunity to learn another language. If Rust can compile to Webassembly and work in the browser, I can learn Rust, and learn it easier because I can apply it in an area that I already have a lot of experience. I don’t think I’m the only one for whom this is true, and I think that’s awesome.

James DiGioia