Lee Freeman

Creating and solving my own stupid bug with idempotency

I was rebuilding a modal at work recently in React and introduced a small bug caused by toggling booleans. Here’s what happened.

Timing functions with TypeScript decorators

So around November/December last year, I really felt like I was stagnating at work. I wasn’t feeling particularly challenged, was undervalued, distracted by my upcoming holiday in Mexico and wasn’t making the progress as a developer that I would have liked. So I decided to try and tackle the last issue as I felt I had the most control of it and I signed up to some courses on Udemy and pick up some new skills. One of those new skills I was interested in was TypeScript – it’s becoming more prevalent in the job market, offers an incremental adoption process and some blockers to adoption at work had been removed.

So I signed up to Stephen Grider’s TypeScript: The Complete Developer’s Guide and I’ve been slowly working through it over the last few months. One of the sections later on in the course is about decorators. I’d seen decorators applied to React-Redux a couple of years ago and I didn’t really understand them/see the need for them and they just generally seemed like confusing magic. Since then I’ve seen similar looking code in my backend colleague’s Spring/Java code, in some Django project I worked with and when looking at some documentation for NestJS. It wasn’t until doing the section of Stephen’s course though that I began to understand them and see some uses for them.

Multiline strings in GraphQL with Neo4J

For the last year or so I’ve been working with GraphQL with NodeJS quite a lot, both as a wrapper around some REST microservices and with the graph database Neo4J. While it hasn’t been a problem with the REST microservice project, line length has been a real problem when working with Neo4J schemas. This week I’ve found out two ways to solve this.

Using React Hooks and Context to build a multilingual site

I wrote a post about using React’s at-the-time new Context API to deal with translating text strings throughout a React app. Looking back, I think a lot can be improved upon, so here we go.

My experience at Codaisseur

I graduated from the Codaisseur Academy program in April 2017. I wrote a few blog posts about my experience and new/prospective students regularly contact me asking for insights/advice etc. Hopefully this post can answer some of the more common questions, but the TLDR is that I did this course over 2 years ago, a lot has changed at Codaisseur and you’re better off finding a more recent graduate to ask.

If there is something I’ve missed, just open an issue on GitHub or something?

Keeping tracking clean in an SPA

You’re on the home straight. Your tests are green. Your code is splitting. Lighthouse/Pagespeed/other performance metrics love you. And then you get the call – it’s marketing. They have just a few scripts they want to add. Bundle-bloat isn’t the worst of it - custom events are needed.

Multilingual sites with React's Context API

React’s new Context API was finally made available with React 16.3 two weeks ago, and I was working on a client’s multilingual site that was passing the locale information through the props of every component. The context API seemed like a fairly decent way of avoiding having to pass the props like this, so this is my super quick implementation of how to do just that.

Amsterdam – one year on

It’s been too long since my last post, but I think the one year anniversary of moving into this flat in Amsterdam is as good as any other to write something.

I'VE GRADUATED! React, come at me!

So, the whole blogging all the way through the course thing didn’t really work out. Things really kicked up a notch once we moved into the advanced bootcamp, and I didn’t really have time for coding and writing. Sorry about that!

If you don’t read any further than this, I’m currently looking for a job to put these new skills to good use. Here’s my GitHub, I’m really interested in React-y/ES6-y roles, so show me what you’ve got.

Shopping carts, APIs, a dash of JS and rebuilding Taste of Code

Well, it’s two weeks since my last post and I’m now halfway through Codaisseur’s two-month web developer academy. I. Am. Ex. Haus. Ted. Admittedly, I’m not making it easy for myself – in the week before last I went to developer meetups on Tuesday and Wednesday, and had scheduled two for the last week (though I ended up sacking off the AmsterdamJS one on Thursday  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).