Design systems are sold on consistency and developer experience, and they deliver both. What rarely makes it onto the slide is that a design system is also the most duplicated dependency in your company: every page of every product pays for its architectural choices. I've spent a lot of time profiling apps where the biggest performance problem wasn't the app at all - it was the system underneath it.
Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in 2024, and it's a much harder metric to game. I've spent a fair amount of time recently digging slow interactions out of production apps. This post covers how I find them and the fixes that actually work.
Writing end-to-end tests has never been the hard part. Keeping them alive is. Playwright now ships three test agents, a planner, a generator and a healer, that take on a surprising amount of that work. I've been trying them out and this post covers how they fit together.
This site has been running on the same Jekyll and webpack setup since 2018. It's been dormant for the last few years. I've rebuilt it with Astro and this post covers that move.
When writing tests with React Testing Library, developers often run into the 'React state updates should be wrapped into act' warning.
I've been working with error boundaries in React. Here's how to effectively test thrown errors by components wrapped in an error boundary using Vitest and React Testing Library.
I was recently writing unit tests for a project and I wanted to test whether a function in one class had been called by a parent class. Sounds simple right? I found it a bit trickier than anticipated so wanted to share my learnings.
A friend of mine introduced me to Svelte and the approach impressed me. Instead of doing a lot of work in the browser inside a virtual DOM (like a lot of frameworks), Svelte is a compiler step, meaning the code is compiled to efficient vanilla JavaScript when the project is built. It results in a considerably lighter load whilst also being able to leverage useful functionality such as reactivity which might be why you're choosing to use a framework in the first place. I combined this with Sapper - since retired in favour of SvelteKit - to get a lightweight, statically generated application out of the box.
I came across a community group who had been managing a Google sheet to detail data about which local businesses were delivering during the Coronavirus crisis. I used this sheet as a backend for an API I built using Lambda and API Gateway.
I'm a big fan of Vue.js and Pinia for state management. Combine this with Nuxt and you can generate a static version of your Vue application and give your users a speedy site served from HTML files. I cover this and how you might approach making the content of your static site dynamic using Netlify build hooks and Contentful as a CMS.
One of things that irks me about the usability of shopping online is the inconsistent checkout experience between different merchants. Do I really need to enter the same delivery/billing address, card number, CVC code etc. into every websites specific form? Payment Request API to the rescue.
Advancing my knowledge around the topic of accessibility has been something I've been doing a lot recently. With this knowledge came the realisation that previous web applications I'd worked on could do with some improvements in this field. There are a few quick wins which could fundamentally improve the accessibility of your web application post-build.
I was asked recently how debouncing works in JavaScript. I knew why I should use it, what it did and that the helper function I'd been using was short and easy to read through. However I didn't grasp what was going on 'under the hood'.