Front-End

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my older Rails apps has been out in production for two years now. When I wrote it back in 2019, I used jQuery and Bootstrap, along with a few other older technologies. Reviewing it recently, I updated to the latest version of Rails 5, removed CoffeeScript, and did some more cleaning and updates. As that work came to a close, I lamented the fact that for all the improvements, the real slow spot in this app is that it still loads the jQuery and Bootstrap assets which are relatively large given the simplicity of the front end. ...

The other night I was looking over an old app of mine, the Chore Scheduler. It started as a desire to rip out references to unused Rails engines, such as ActionCable and ActionMailer. Since these are not used by the app, but were included by the basic rails new command. Off we go on another adventure. You can take a look at the repo as it’s open on Github. Runtime Dependencies I started out by ripping out the require rails/all in my application.rb. This all file requires a bunch of pieces, such as ActiveRecord, ActiveStorage, ActionCable, etc. So by removing it, and manually adding each engine that I actually want to use, I can reduce the amount of code loaded at runtime. Not a huge win, but why not? ...

After the experience with tag pages, I finally had some motivation to try another static site generator - Hugo. I chose Hugo because it’s One of the post popular options Written in Go - a language I’ve been trying to work with more Unboxing I followed the quick start page and used HomeBrew to install Hugo as a binary, then installed the PaperMod theme after taking a look at the gallery of options. With that, I was off and running with a site that ...

The latest adventure I’ve been on is one with Typescript. The technology was developed by Microsoft as a way to add typing to Javascript. It’s popularity has been increasing over the past few years. I had some experience with it working on Angular 2 projects during my time at Snag. Having gone from that environment to my current job and projects written with more pure Javascript, it’s been very interesting to come back to it and have the experience anew. ...

At the top of posts on this site, you can see the tags for each post. This was a somewhat “out-of-the-box” feature of the Jekyll theme that I chose to use and I always liked the look of them, but it bugged me that they were just text without a link to anywhere. It made sense to me that they would be a link to a page that included the posts that also used this tag. ...

Wait, wasn’t the last post about Vue? How have we switched to Svelte already?!? Let me explain. Svelte is a fantastic front-end component library developed originally by Rich Harris of the New York Times. It doesn’t have the widespread popularity that Vue, React and Angular have, but it is growing in notoriety, especially since the release of version 3 in 2019. In my limited world view (of the front-end), it stands out because it has always focused on pre-compilation to provide a … svelte … javascript file rather than including a “run-time” library of javascript code that manipulates the virtual DOM. This is a feature that has since been developed into many frameworks/libraries, but it is what makes Svelte unique. ...

It’s been a while. I plan on writing more posts on all the things I’ve been up to in the last six months. One of them was finally experimenting with VueJS. I’ll cover my thoughts more in a future post. For now I want to introduce my first Vue component (on this blog). I plan on expanding my playground by using VueJS on this very blog. This will have two benefits, ...

As I’ve hinted in a previous posts, I’ve been experimenting with Firebase. While I’m no expert, I have learned a few things that I’d like to share and document. Firebase What is Firebase? It’s a unique hosting platform that is owned by Google and runs on the Google Cloud. What’s unique about it? In overly simple terms, it’s a tool set for offering a backend as a service. You write an app (javascript, iOS or Android) and use the Firebase SDK to perform the backend tasks such as authentication and data persistance. The marketing makes the case for this to be a great platform for small applications to get off the ground and then it can continue to grow. There’re also many more features and services around A/B testing, analytics and more. ...

I’ve been wanting to get this developer blog going for a while. Lots of things get in the way, work, home life, pets, family, other side projects. But I’m happy to make this first post! Why do I call this a developer blog? I make the distinction because posts here will focus on developer, software engineering topics. It’s meant to remove the burden of doing a full Dev.to or Medium post that may require more time and research. This is meant to be more fast, rough and just for the knowledge. ...