I enjoyed the Advent of Code this past December, a lot, especially since I was doing it with some of my teammates. There were some great lessons learned, and who doesn't love to learn? We were discussing the benefits of a coding challenge like this and decided to think up our own! Our coding challenge... Continue Reading →
Style up your console.logs
This is nothing new, but something I only recently started doing. Ya know those console.logs you're using in your JavaScript code? Did you know you can style them in the dev toolbar? YA! In both your browser console and nodejs! Styling the browser console It's really that simple! Throw a %c in your console.log message,... Continue Reading →
Viewing your state with React’s useReducer
In a previous post I shared an approach to enhance reducer actions in your React Context. I've worked through this a few times and found one thing this approach doesn't have that something like Redux does: the logger. Well, there's a separate library for logging called redux-logger. This nifty little piece of middleware writes out... Continue Reading →
Introduction to the new CSS aspect-ratio property
There's a new CSS property available that I'm pretty excited about. Traditionally, if you wanted to size an image to be widescreen, you'd have to do some math on your own. Then making it responsive gets tricky as well. Widescreen is 16:9, so if it's 1200px wide, how tall should it be? On mobile, when... Continue Reading →
Enhancing reducer actions in React Context
State management in ReactJS is uber important, and there is a plethora of content in the wild about how best to do this: from libraries like Redux to using useState in a component. React also has this neat little useReducer hook for using a reducer in your component. This follows the typical reducer pattern of... Continue Reading →
How Small Business Owners Can Keep Customers Happy in a Busy World
I’m excited to have guest writer Chelsea Lamb from Business Pop share this post! Customers have a lot of options these days. With the convenience technology has brought to shopping, people have the ability to be more selective with where they get their products and services. Small business owners must keep this in mind if they hope... Continue Reading →
Animating in a circular fashion with CSS and ReactJS
If you haven't seen, at the start of COVID I created this neat little virtual happy hour app. I got to the point where I wanted to start spicing up the interface some (still a long way to go). I wanted to move away from a list view of conversations to something that illustrates people... Continue Reading →
Advent of Code is over, here’s what I thought
And just like that, Advent of Code is over! If you're just catching this thread now, back at Day 1 I explained a little why I took on this challenge: I love these little challenges because it keeps me sharp, makes me think about things differently than I may be doing daily at work. Also,... Continue Reading →
Advent of Code, Day 25
The last and final day of Advent of Code is here! What a great ride! I'll share my thoughts of this experience in a subsequent post soon. Day 25: Combo Breaker Part I Working with a security key card, and some sniffing on what's going on between the key card and to door, I have... Continue Reading →
Advent of Code, Day 24 – Black Lives Matter
Day 24 of Advent of Code is here! Black Lives Matter Today's puzzle uses two color options, black and white. And as we step through the rules we are changing tiles from black to white, and visa-versa. At some point I need to find how many black neighbors a tile has and change it based... Continue Reading →