Tag: Gatsby

Over the past month I have been adding features to the blog that I had put off for long enough. As I aim to write more, it was time to address some glaring omissions in my initial implementation. This included adding proper category and tag pages, post metadata, and other small features. Gatsby's tight integration with GraphQL enabled quick iteration and development of these new features. Some features required as little as adding a utility field to a GraphQL query to implement. Data selection per query One of GraphQL's core features is the ability to select only the required data. A selection set is the specific data requested within a given type. GraphQL uses a declarative data structure. This means that the API consumer specifies the…

Last week I decided to install the React 16.8 alpha on a branch and experiment with React Hooks in preparation for their release on February 6, 2018. The site utilized a render prop based Slideshow component in several places as well as a handful of other class based components. Through this process, I was able to consolidate the application code and eliminate all class based components from the site's code base. The React team does not recommend refactoring your entire codebase to Hooks on their release. I did this primarily as a means to engage with the Hooks API in a relatively small codebase. You can find the code conversion to Hooks discussed in this post at the related PR. Converting to Hooks and lessons learned The Hooks…

I am so excited to announce that the redesign of my portfolio and blog is finally live after going back to to the conceptual drawing board and rebuilding it from the ground up. It has been an exciting journey to implement new development and design concepts that I have picked up since May 2017 when I built the first version of the site. At the time, it was the first full site that I had put together, and was substantially more involved than the relatively small projects I had done to that point. Since then I worked on more complex applications, built a full stack travel application with a team of two other developers, and dove headfirst into React. The previous version of the site was built using Jekyll as a static site generator. This was…