Handling auth is painful. But most applications need to authenticate users and control what resources they can access. Microservices, though growing in popularity, can add complexity. You need to secure both the user’s actions and the interactions between services. AWS offers some great building blocks for…

Microinteractions guide a user through your application. They reinforce your user experience and provide delight. You may have seen some of the slick examples of microinteractions on Dribble or CodePen. But do you know how to build your own library of similar UI widgets? In this article, I’ll focus on…

A prospective founder must ask: is my idea viable? But this question also must be addressed throughout the startup’s life. This story is my cheat sheet for evaluating the viability and strategy of startups. I spent 10 years with Pivotal Labs (now Pivotal), working with hundreds of startups. Some like…

Developers are adopting Higher Order Components (HOC) Stateless Functional Components, and for good reason: they make it easier to achieve code reuse, a coveted aspiration of developers. There are many articles on HOC and Functional Stateless Components. Some are introductions and others describe deep technical aspects; I’ll explore refactoring existing…

I recently built an Electron app using create-react-app. I didn’t need to muck about with Webpack, or “eject” my app, either. I’ll walk you through how I accomplished this. I was drawn to the idea of using create-react-app because it hides the webpack configuration details. But my search for existing…

I thought of the above sketch when I recently was explaining why refactoring can be joyous for a developer. A common workflow pattern is to make something work, however you can. Once you have it working, you clean up your code (refactor), such that the external behavior/functionality is unchanged, but…

TL;DR: Here is a GitHub repo that has a create-react-app project with necessary dev dependencies and the WebStorm run configurations. npm install and open the project in Webstorm. You can set a breakpoint in App.test.js and run the Tests configuration in debug mode to try it out. (This has only…

We all know the line; but a startup should ask: “If we build it, will anyone care?” It can be very tempting to jump to developing an idea and then get caught up in the excitement of creative flow and possibilities. But you could waste a lot of time (and…

I think it is easy to lose focus, especially in a startup. There is always too much to do, so much to learn and explore, changing pressures, limited resources…and the list goes on. For me, I gain comfort and clarity from North Star Questions and Principles. These are a few…