Date Archives → July 2015

The Road To 100 Signups

The Road To 100 Signups

This year, I had a fuck this moment. I decided that I want to be able to do something interesting with my life. And with the help of 30×500, I actually started working towards it.

To me, “doing something interesting with my life” means making things people love. In my position, the most immediate way I can achieve this is by writing about the Web – it is the thing I’ve spent the most hours of my life doing, and I care possibly a little too much about making it better.

But enough being serious – the real reason I’m writing this is that 100 signups is the best excuse I’ll get to look back at what went well, what didn’t, and how to improve things. And to show you lots of pretty graphs!

And since it’s that kind of article, I’m going to put the meat before the veggies and start with:

Continue reading →

Building a property passthrough Higher-Order Component for React

Just want the component? Find it at GitHub

Possibly the most frequently re-implemented code across any React component is that used to pass properties through to child components. This stems from the fact that you generally need some sort of input to make the component useful, while you don’t want these component-specific properties polluting the props on your children.

This would be all well and good if it wasn’t for the fact it is so easy to avoid re-implementing this over and over again! I mean, you’re already defining the properties you consume in propTypes – why repeat yourself?

In fact, by passing your React classes through a Higher-Order Component, you can easily add a method which returns all props except the ones specified in propTypes – making writing components that-much-easier (and consistent). I’ll show you how to do it in a moment, but first lets have a look at:

Continue reading →

Unlocking decorators and other ES7 features with Webpack and Babel

Update 2015/11/08: This guide assumes you’re using Babel 5.
For Babel 6, see my new guides to Babel 6 & Webpack, and Babel 6 & NPM.

While Babel has great ES6 support and a few ES7 goodies, some of the most interesting proposals are still locked behind the “stage 0” wall. This is all well and good if you need to build code which you can guarantee will work without compilation in a few years time, but if that was the case, you probably wouldn’t be using any ES7 features at all. So given how curious you obviously are (after all, you’re reading this), let’s go ahead and unlock them.

Continue reading →

A Quick Tour Of ES6 (Or, The Bits You’ll Actually Use)

Just want examples of ES6 in use? I’ve put four ES6 projects on Github.

ES6 has been getting a lot of press lately. And with all of the benefits that the new syntax and built-ins bring, it damn well should. But given the breadth of the changes, how is a forward-thinking developer to know where to start? What is worth practicing now, and what is best left for a rainy day?

Well, after spending the last few weeks writing maxim and memamug with ES6, and translating numbat-ui from coffeescript, there are a few parts which have stood out to me.

Continue reading →