Posts

Weekends are normally for RnD time, so this weekend’s topic - standardisation of front/backend communication. Considering backend as API-only and fully offloading the rendering part to JavaScript frameworks, EmberJS had a really nice concept of ember-data that acted in between rendering components and backend objects received via API. JSData can be an alternative to this: SData is a framework-agnostic, datastore-agnostic ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) for Node.js and the Browser. Adapters allow JSData to connect to various data sources such as Firebase, MySql, MongoDB, REST API, etc....

After the release of Headless Chrome browser (v59+) most of the automation tools slowly started reducing the usage of Selenium, by replacing it with the combination of chromedriver + chrome/chromium pre-installed browser (like Travis CI does on their images). As a replacement, I’ve tried playing around with the combination of Karma/Chai to test JavaScript functionality of certain projects we have in Qobo. It only introduced the unit test approach towards the code base....

The devil is in details, so people say. Few months ago, while working on prototype of cakephp-calendar, we had an interesting debate over front-end stack for Calendar component. At the same time, WordPress community was buzzing about their text editor - Gutenberg whether to use ReactJS vs VueJS libraries. One of the reasons of choosing VueJS, was licensing agreement. The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion....

It took me some time to figure out what’s been going wrong with the watchers working on datepicker integration for CakePHP-Calendar plugin. Problem domain On loading modal window for creating calendar event, one of the dropdowns pass default start/end time for the event interval (start/end dates). This config object is passed to as a property into interval component that contains two child datepicker components. Whenever the config property changes, it adjusts startMoment and endMoment objects and passes them into datepickers....

A quick lookup on modern JavaScript and whole Babel thing. This will be a start of a small research on splitting frontend and backend implementation for CakePHP framework and its plugin. Babel JS: ES2015 ES6: Features Webpack - Confusing Parts Babel JS: Loaders & Plugins Jest for Webpack * “Getting started with Babel” from John Arstingstall CakePHP and Webpack plugin

On March 2017, Eugene Gusev had an interesting talk (in Russian) at HolyJS regarding the technological singularity as whole in Front-End, and JavaScript ecosystem in particular. As a thesis taken, he noted an enormous number of 350k packages in NPM. Few points being stated over the talk: Quality of the packages (aka younglings publish low quality tools) Hype over the ecosystem (frameworks and libs go up and down in popularity scale)....

I’ve been using Office 365 for office correspondence for about 7 months, since I moved to Qobo. Today I say enough to Office365 corporate lookalike email client. Everything is back to Google. UX experience One of the things I couldn’t get used to is the right-click bindings. I guess the assumption was to enrich the functionality of the interface by letting you move/delete assets on your sidebar (aka folder management). As the result - half of the browser daily routine is cut off....

It’s old, but still relevant to the topic. I’m pretty sure that everybody had this kind of interface on one of their jobs. I’m pretty sure it’s still there! First rule of UI club - you don’t talk about crap UI’s you designed in the club.

Interesting interview with one of the core members of CakePHP community - Larry E. Masters. Throughout the interview Larry covers CakePHP Framework history, as well as covering major milestones of CakePHP 3.x version. If you’re still into 2.x then it’s time to upgrade, as it brings some nice perks. More flexible code, and massive performance boost.

Seth Godin published once again a great article on work/life motivation. Becoming a better version of yourself Catastrophe (or the world as we know it will end) Connection (because others will join in) Creative itch (the voice inside of you wants to be expressed) Dissatisfaction (because it’s not good enough as it is) Engineer (because there’s a problem to be solved) Generosity (because it’s a chance to contribute) Possibility (because we can, and it’ll be neat to see how it works in the world) Selection (to get in, win the prize, be chosen)