Category Archives: general development
Adding React to an Existing Web Application
There are seemingly endless articles online for building web applications with React. Almost every single one assumes you are building a Single Page Application, from scratch, using React. But to me, one of the most impressive things about React is that you can add React components to any web application without it being a SPA…
The The Tool Set and Build Process – Adding React to an Existing Web Application
This article is part of series on adding React to an existing server side rendered application. To be honest, the hardest part of injecting React components into an existing web application is getting the tool set configured. I’ll cover the tools used as well as the configuration to produce ready-to-consume components. This article was written…
Rendering Single Components – Adding React to an Existing Web Application
This article is part of series on adding React to an existing server side rendered application. Booked will never be a single page application. It just doesn’t make sense. But I still wanted to get the benefits of all the awesome stuff React allows you to do. The fact that React doesn’t require your whole…
Rendering “SPAs” – Adding React to an Existing Web Application
This article is part of series on adding React to an existing server side rendered application. In the last article I covered all the nitty gritty details on how individual, reusable components are built and made available to server-side rendered pages. That all applies to how these mini single page applications are built, as well,…
Communicating Between Components – Adding React to an Existing Web Application
This article is part of series on adding React to an existing server side rendered application. We’ve already seen how easy it is to add React components within an existing server-side rendered page. The biggest challenge is that React is driven by state changes rather than more traditional method calls, so forcing React updates from…
Setting React element values directly from Selenium
I love Selenium, but there are a few things that it still handles poorly. Interacting with non-standard web native inputs is one of those items, for example color pickers, date inputs. You can usually get around these by simply setting the value using the executeScript method. But this doesn’t work so easily if you are…
We don’t have a QA team here
Testing was a bottleneck. Bugs were being discovered by users in production. Obviously, the QA team wasn’t providing any value and changes needed to be made.
Test driven development when I have no idea how to test anything
It’s no secret that I’m a firm believer in the effectiveness of test-driven development. But I don’t practice TDD 100% of the time. One of those times is when I’m just getting started with a new technology or library. For me, one of the hardest aspects of TDD is writing a test when I have…
Machine Readable Logs in PHP
I’m a big believer that log files should be easy for machines to read and ingest. Structured logging opens up the door for using tools like the ELK stack or Splunk to aggregate, search, monitor, and alert on application activity. The most common format for structured logging seems to be JSON. There are, of course,…
Node – Get Named Command Line Arguments
I am writing a small command line utility using Node and needed to get named arguments from the command line. A quick Google search led me down crazy complicated rabbit holes and (of course) a bunch of recommendations to just install npm modules. There ain’t no way I’m installing an npm module to READ COMMAND…