Thoughts ontech and business

This post walks through how to enable ReCAPTCHA in a performant way with Next.js

With the new Next.js router, setting up analytics isn't quite as straightforward as it used to be.

Most web developers have a general sense of how their browser works behind the scenes, but when it comes to technical SEO and core web vitals, things get confusing. This post will alleviate some of that confusion for you and explain the sequential steps a browser takes to load a webpage.

Doing forms right in React is difficult. Whether you're dynamically building forms, adding complex validation, or just dealing with all the different input types, there are lots of pitfalls to building stable forms. This post is an exploration of some "best practices" when using forms in React.

When building with React, when should you useState? useEffect? useMemo? useRef? How do you make your components more performant? What causes them to re-render? What is a re-render? While it doesn't take much to build things in React, understanding how things work and adopting best practices is a bit more challenging. This post will explore many of these questions and walk through a functional component example from start to finish, highlighting it's entire lifecycle.

Tools like create-react-app are great, but abstract away lots of details. Here's how you can set up a "vanilla" React + TypeScript app using Webpack.

There are many ways to handle file uploads in a web app. This post explores which ones are best for your use case.

A brief overview of what JS module systems are for and the differences between the major module systems available like CommonJS, UMD, AMD, and ESModules.

A quick walkthrough of how I setup an RSS feed for my blog with Next.js and the Nrwl NX monorepo tooling.

A quickstart for setting up your new Mac for development.

Build a masonry layout of images that are clickable and open into a beautiful lightbox with Next.js

The Next.js Image component does a lot under the hood, but how does it work and how do you use it effectively?

Learn what SVGs are and the core concepts you need to know as a web developer about them.

CSS Grid was released in 2017 and comes with powerful layout-related CSS features. In this post, I'll teach you the basics of CSS Grid and how it can make your layouts more robust and your workflow simpler.

In this post, we will learn how Flexbox can help you arrange elements on webpages effortlessly and responsively! This post is long and detailed. It's got everything you'll ever need to know about Flexbox!

In this post, we will learn what "responsive web design" is and why we care so much about it as developers.

In this post, we will learn all about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and some of its related topics such as the box model, css grid, flexbox, and css frameworks.

In this post, we will learn the fundamentals of HTML (hypertext markup language) along with its associated concept of the DOM (document object model). Furthermore, we will see how HTML and JavaScript work together to create a webpage.

In this post, we will cover the most common built-in JavaScript objects and methods and learn how to read the documentation for them.

In this post, we will be focusing on functions, conditionals, and loops in JavaScript.

In this post, we will combine our knowledge of JavaScript variables with operators!

In this post, we will learn the basics of JavaScript variables

In this post, I'll answer some of the most commmon questions about the JavaScript programming language and provide an introduction for how we will be using it.

In this post, you will learn how to write your first ever JavaScript program along with a brief introduction to browser developer tools.

A quick introduction to my series on learning to code. Through this free series, you will go from zero experience to deploying your first fullstack web application. Along the way, I'll teach you the essential web development concepts needed for 2021 and beyond.

Links to all of the lessons within the fullstack developer series.

In this post, you will learn (with real examples) the differences between front, back, and fullstack web development.

In this post, I'll explain some of the differences between text editors, code editors, and IDEs along with some recommendations when first learning to code.

Automated websites. NoCode revolution. AI automating developers? These are all questions that might make you wonder whether learning to code is still worth your time. Here's my take as a developer.

Please welcome the most overused term in software sales. Add the word "API" to your sales pitch and you'll sound much smarter to your prospective clients. In this post, we're going to break down what an API actually is and why you hear it so often.

When you are trying to decide whether learning to code is an achievable path for you, regardless of your skill in math, you probably will wonder at some point just how much math is involved with programming. In this post, we'll take a look and see.

JavaScript dates are the bain of every developer's existence. But they don't need to be. This is the last guide you'll ever need.

To an experienced RxJS user, marble diagrams are helpful. To someone just starting out with RxJS, they look like a little kid’s drawing in art class. I’m by no means an expert user of RxJS, but I’ve used it enough to make sense of these “marble diagrams”. I can finally use rx marbles with confidence, and I want you to get there too.

It’s 2020, and Angular is on version 10 with over 1200 contributors and 18,500 commits. I think it’s safe to say that this project has picked up some momentum over the years. But when I started using Angular (it was on version 4 when I started), these things didn’t matter to me. Heck, I probably couldn’t have explained what open source software was and definitely couldn’t have explained what Typescript was...

Maybe you heard it in an Object Oriented Programming book. Maybe you read it on Stack Overflow. Maybe you're reading a textbook for school. Eventually, you get annoyed reading the terms "declarative" and "imperative" because you know they are important but have no clue why. In my mind, knowing the difference between imperative and declarative programming is useful for a single reason, and that is to help you better understand the difference between procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming styles. By understanding these five terms, while reading code libraries, you will begin to see where the authors got their code designs.

This post explores the differences between monolithic, layered, and microservice software architectures and why we need them.

Understanding all the various cloud storage types can be intimidating. In this post, we walk through terms like DAS, NAS, Block, File, Object, and other types of storage.

For most home users, trying to understand a home network is not of interest due to the perceived complexity of the issue. In this post, whether you are a seasoned engineer or simply a Dad trying to figure out why the router isn't working again, I will explain the basics of how your home network works.

Bash scripts can be intimidating to learn, but can be great for ad-hoc sysadmin tasks.

One of the most important components to a good development environment is a properly configured $PATH variable. Learn about it in this post.

Aside from basic commands such as `cd`, `ls`, `mkdir`, `touch`, etc., there is a short list of commands that I think every bash user should know about and attempt to use on a regular basis.

Networking is a huge concept. There are textbooks written on the topic, and therefore, I have no chance of covering everything you need to know relating to networking. That said, this section will get into the most common Bash networking utilities that you can use to diagnose network issues on your computer. If you are completely new to network concepts, that is completely fine as I will be explaining the basics of the internet in this post.

Process and system management sounds like an intimidating concept, but for the average bash user, there are only a few commands and programs that you will need to learn to get a holistic understanding of how your computer runs.

Everybody hates regular expressions... Right? In this post, I'll show you why you need to learn them and how they can help you.

This post is a brief introduction to using the bash ssh utility.

Many tutorials cover the topic of permissioning within a UNIX based operating system, but often overlooked is the topic of users and groups. For individual users, it is difficult to understand what the usefulness of this architecture is. In this short tutorial, I will be walking through the reason why we have permissions, how to set permissions, and how to manage your users and groups that these permissions apply to.

In this post, I am going to walk through why the Passport-JWT authentication strategy is a simple, secure solution for small teams and startups implementing a Node/Express + Angular web app.

You know those concepts that you learn over and over again, yet they seem to vanish from your memory no matter how many notebooks you fill with detailed notes? The `this` keyword in Javascript was one of those concepts for me, until I finally took an afternoon to understand the inner-workings of the code rather than hopelessly trying to memorize the 4 types of "bindings" (default, implicit, explicit, and "new") that influence the value of `this`.

If you write web applications (and the authentication for them) or work in the space of cryptocurrency, understanding the basics of asymmetric cryptography (also known as "Public Key Cryptography") is a must.

In this crash course, you'll learn everything you need to know about the Git source control utility. From the basics to an advanced developer workflow, everything is here in this guide.