Tag: GraphQL

The Linked List is a collection of interesting articles that I have recently read and found beneficial. Today's links cover web accessibility, upcoming features to ECMAScript, breaking down imperative vs declarative programming, and why your GraphQL APIs should embrace nullability. When Is A Button Not A Button?: Buttons have a number of built in accessibility and user interactions built in. Learn more and the dangers of trying to substitute other elements for buttons. Optional Chaining in JavaScript: This past week optional chaining entered stage 3 for TC 39 consideration. This syntax enables cleaner code for drilling without a bunch of type guards. Check out the full proposal at the link above. If you’re interested in trying it out use…

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…

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…

It’s no secret that I love GraphQL. I first encountered it when transitioning this site to Gatsby at the start of the year. Gatsby incorporates GraphQL into their data layer and exposes multiple plugins to incorporate data sources. When I started exploring GraphQL in more detail, the number of resources and their detail was substantially less. I won’t even go into how long I spent trying to find information on testing strategies. One of my personal missions has been to help break down barriers to learning GraphQL amongst people in my circles. It is substantially less intimidating to get started than first glance may appear, and the reference material has increased. I have given several talks on the topic, breaking down the core concepts and…