Category: JavaScript

TDD in non-UI: “Man, this code requires a lot of stubs just to make 1 function call. This API design is bad, I should fix it”.

TDD in UI: “Man, this code requires a lot of stubs, I should fix. Hey Visual Designer, can you… no? Ok. Hey API designer… can you? No… ok.”

This is one reason of many why UI developers like back-end for front-ends. When testing your UI, having to stub 20 http requests + 2 JWT tokens just to show 1 screen is painful. Having just 1 or 3 API’s for a screen is so much easier, and makes your tests less likely to break in the future.

We should have a new holiday, or at least designate 1 Saturday at year to “Respite from Fighting Conway’s Law Day”. Unclear what the goal is beyond to take a break trying to change culture, re-access why you’re even trying, for that day you’re allowed to NOT think you’re crazy.

What a coincidence; today is World Mental Health Day 🤪.

Progress on Final Fantasy Legend level editor.

My biggest frustration was how to deal with multidimensional Array’s in Elm. In JavaScript, if you want to build a 2D grid, you just put Array’s in Array’s like so:

Update October 4th, 2023: Added an additional explanation on how you can more easily create Unions making them more readable, and compared them to other languages.

The common theme in a lot of React examples utilizes 2 types of data to build React components around: primitives and Objects. In this article, we’re going to talk about a 3rd called Discriminated Unions. We’ll go over what problems they solve, what their future looks like in JavaScript and possibly TypeScript, and what libraries can help you now.

Unions in TypeScript can help prevent a lot of common bugs from happening so they’re worth using, especially for UI developers where we have to visualize complicated data. While Unions help narrow what you have to draw, they also expose edge cases that your UI Designer/Product Owner may not have accounted for in their visual design. In JavaScript this would be a blank screen, a null pointer, or an error boundary that you’re confused about. Most importantly, they can help you make impossible situations impossible.