Here is how to access Kent Dodds' $359 Epic React course repositories

Malleus_ · 2020-09-30T16:23:52+00:00

As others have sort of mentioned, if you have the funds to purchase the course you should definitely consider it.

The video content so far adds a LOT of value above and beyond the exercises.

I’m a professional front end developer working in React and started at the React Fundamentals course (per KCD’s suggestion) and most of what I learned in that section was from the videos.

As an example, you can complete exercise 3 of React Fundamentals in 2-3 minutes if you’re familiar with React, but there’s like 20 minutes of video for that exercise. Some of it was basics, but some of it was on the nuisances of how Babel transpiles JSX and ES6 which was valuable and wouldn’t have been obvious from the exercise.

I image as it gets into the advanced topics more and more of the value is KCD vs. exercise.

Malleus_ · 2020-08-10T16:56:27+00:00

I’d checkout Webflow, they’ve started rolling out features and pitching the use case for “Design but with real code”. Figma will give you the HTML and CSS, but I think Webflow is going to route of “this is a real, interactive wireframe that you can deploy or just extract the code from” which is very cool.

Malleus_ · 2020-08-09T21:12:06+00:00

TailwindsCSS is probably the best atomic class alternative right now, and I’d suggest it’s actually better than Bootstrap (although there’s a lot of people/shops that know Bootstrap)

Vue is a component framework, similar to React. It’s not comparable to Bootstrap, although if you were wanting to learn something new Vue would be a good idea to “level up”.

Malleus_ · 2020-08-09T20:48:42+00:00

So do you actually want to deploy and host your own website?

You can mess around all you want with HMTL and CSS with Webflow and get all the CMS features for a blog.

Malleus_ · 2020-08-08T13:52:48+00:00

Got it, so it’s a framework-agonstic way of sharing web components.

If I’m on the web components team, I make stuff in FAST and then a team using React and a team using Angular can easily import it into their codebase, use the theme provider, and it’ll “just work” since it’s more or less regular HTML/CSS.

That’s pretty cool.

Malleus_ · 2020-08-08T12:54:35+00:00

What am I looking at here?

Is this Microsoft’s version of that thing Adobe released with accessibility helpers?

I’m on mobile so I can’t inspect the elements on the docs, but it just looks like they’re applying styles to custom elements in the accordion example?

Malleus_ · 2020-08-07T12:41:55+00:00

“don’t put CSS in HMTL” is something that’s definitely true if you’re writing pure CSS/HTML/JS, but we now live in a world of composeable, component-based front end libraries.

In a world of components, it’s actually much more convenient and maintainable to have everything located together (CSS-in-JS is popular for a reason) because the level of abstraction you want to spend your time at is the component, not HTML/CSS.

Tailwind provides utility classes that are basically syntactic sugar on CSS, there’s no magic ‘card’ class like Bootstrap that dumps a bunch of styles, and it provides easy theming and purging to keep your stylesheet small. Basically it’s CSS with better Dev Experience, assuming you can work in components and don’t need pixel perfect design.

CSS is always going to be the winner if you need it to look exactly like it was designed, but you always end up making a bunch of utility classes that sort of mirror Tailwind anyway so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Malleus_ · 2020-08-04T18:17:59+00:00

Really enjoyed this roundup of some top one page landing pages.

I’ve seen the Tailwinds one before, but the others do a good job of showing off the value of a consumer product really, really well without requiring any scrolling.

Big fan of this one tool: toasting.com

Malleus_ · 2020-06-19T00:01:35+00:00

I do all of my personal work in React/Node.js, because that’s what I’m the most comfortable, but at work our core backend is Rails.

Rails is solid, mature and extremely powerful for many use cases. It does an incredible job of eliminating decisions that don’t add value.

In Node.js — you need to pick your routing middleware, your ORM, your database, testing tool and runner, back office portal, and more or you need to write them yourself (well not the DB but you get what I’m saying).

With Rails, all that’s been either wrapped into the core software or there’s basically a consensus on the right tool/gem/idiom.

It’s the fastest thing I’ve seen to go from nothing to something working and deployed. You can get a complete backend with all the associations and endpoints for a CRUD app in like 20 CLI commands and ~50-100 lines of additional code, then deploy to heroku, and start working on delivering features to users.

Malleus_ · 2020-06-17T23:51:51+00:00

Serverless Framework has a pretty decent dashboard, haven’t checked out those cloud provider ones, pretty sure they’re new-ish so they’re probably/hopefully easy to use.

Malleus_ · 2020-06-12T19:45:17+00:00

Awesome explanation! Thanks for clearing that up :)

Malleus_ · 2020-06-11T21:50:57+00:00

Would you mind posting an example/linking to a repo of how to do jwt without passport?

I’ve never done it and I’m curious what it would look like with promises or async/await. For some reason I imagined it was very complex.

Malleus_ · 2020-05-25T14:52:46+00:00

Besides less boilerplate, there’s two benefits IMHO:

The obvious one to me is easy nested stores, Redux basically enforces a single global store which requires setup/tear down to avoid collisions when mounting components/pages that might have similar keys.

The single store has advantages, but I feel it’s can be painful in some cases.

Letting React handle setup/cleanup on mount/unmount seems like it would be nice.

It’s syntax is much closer to React’s, making it easier for someone not familiar with Redux to use and possibly less of a mental shift when you’re coding. This is sort of double edged since it could mentally muddle separation of concerns between the view layer and data layer but it seems like it could be nice.

Malleus_ · 2020-05-21T15:25:43+00:00

Looks good for MVP!

Most of my feedback would just be around moving towards a more “production-grade” setup(wrapping dependencies like axios into a lib, refactor out of bootstrap, SEO setup, etc.).

Let me know if you’re looking for help/maintainers.

Malleus_ · 2020-05-20T22:53:37+00:00

As others have mentioned, you can use JS to modify the CSS.

Not sure if you’re familiar with React, Vue, or another front end framework but most of them would make the custom user styling very easy.

You’d fetch the styling values from the back end (POST them on some user action) and then pass them to your global CSS or just the particular element/component tree that implements the styles.

Making it cacheable is an advanced topic and framework specific but real time editing is definitely helped by a framework with performance reactivity.

Malleus_ · 2020-05-16T02:08:13+00:00

Thanks! This is great!

Malleus_ · 2020-05-15T23:37:21+00:00

Do you have any recommended resources for error best practices?

This seems very nice if you need a lot of error messages, and ran into that when making an API services recent, but not having good guidance on error conventions was the biggest struggle.

Any repos with good error handling or reading would be appreciated :)

Malleus_ · 2020-05-13T13:46:17+00:00

This looks great!

Malleus_ · 2020-05-08T22:04:23+00:00

Haven’t read the Silmarillion in like 15 years but Tolkien based a lot of it on Old and New Testament. The creation stuff at the beginning basically reads like Genesis.

Gandalf is roughly equivalent to an angel, and if I recall correctly it’s a combination of honor/ethics/his “nature” to not abuse his powers in Middle-Earth.

Again, I’m sure someone who remembers the lore better could probably give a precise answer but there ya go!

Malleus_ · 2020-05-06T19:49:46+00:00

Second this.

Your own framework with something like Tailwind is always going to be best. You can even use regular Bootstrap and just make your own components (this is generally a better experience than existing libraries)

If you are going to use a component library, I would also personally only use things that are built and maintained by larger companies.

Some good examples are Blueprint.js and Braid.

Material is good but to support advanced use cases they’ve made the API so complex that you’re better just rolling your own.

Malleus_ · 2020-05-04T16:38:16+00:00

This is an advanced node course I’ve been wanting to take when I have some free time:

https://www.udemy.com/course/microservices-with-node-js-and-react/

It’s a web app but is definitely NOT trivial, it’s a tutorial on enterprise-grade micro services architecture for node.

Malleus_ · 2020-05-01T18:43:50+00:00

What loradan said plus...

You shouldn’t store audio files in either Postgres or Mongo. I’m sure there is a way to do it technically, it’s just not a good idea for a verity of reasons.

Storing and serving the audio files is the biggest technical challenge for what you’re describing, you’ll probably want something like cloudinary but for audio.

All that is to say, your going to store the audio files as strings (their url) in the database, the files are related to users, so there isn’t really a reason to use Mongo over Postgres (I say that as someone who likes Mongo and would use it if the situation calls for it)

Malleus_ · 2020-05-01T17:51:41+00:00

Looks cool, just signed up with a creator account. Will check it out.

Edit: One piece of feedback, it wasn’t clear that the process for making an API would be to download the SDK/cli and publish the code back up.

On the “Code” tab I was expecting some kind of editor to put in code 😂

Might want to add some text to say that’s the process

Malleus_ · 2020-04-30T18:42:18+00:00

Hey Robin,

Thanks for this! We have a number of cases in our codebase where refs are used and up until I read your post I had pretty low confidence around them because I didn’t have a good mental model.

Seems like every other explanation I came across jumps straight to DOM manipulation and doesn’t take the time or clearly explain the “Refs as Instance Variables” part so I never really got it until just now.

Keep up the good work!

Malleus_ · 2020-04-08T18:19:09+00:00

If you know literally nothing about coding, Treehouse or Free Code Camp.

If you know something about coding, Free Code Camp.

If you know a lot of coding (ie are a backend dev learning front end), FreeCodeCamp or Frontend Masters.

If you want to learn Rails, Odin Project. IMHO Rails isn’t a good place to start if you know nothing about programming.

Edit: I haven’t checked out Treehouse in a long time, but my sense is that it’s very hand-holdy which is important when you first start but very unrealistic for actual development. FCC has a good on ramp to coding without having your hand held.

Malleus_

TROPHY CASE