Tag: tooling

I have used ESLint for a long time, often extending the recommended rules from various plugins. I only read a rule’s documentation if I wasn’t sure why it was being flagged in the linter. Last month I read through and manually set 381 ESLint rules, reading the accompanying docs for each rule. I discovered that ESLint is more than enforcing community guidelines on code quality. It also helps to shape use of the language as a whole and through project specific rule usage. Greater control for team objectives There are a number of rules the recommended configurations of ESLint or various plugins do not enable by default. These rules serve specific needs of a given project. They can be enabled and configured on a per project basis and provide…

Jest Snapshots can be a valuable utility for monitoring code changes for UI components. They can also become a scourge if they become too large. The line between the two isn't always clear. Snapshots don't offer a clear mechanism to determining how large they are. This makes it easy to create large snapshots that are hard to diff. The likelihood of a thorough review on a snapshot diff decreases in relation to the size of the snapshot. I have both observed and committed broken snapshot updates into repositories as part of a branch. The danger lies in making intentional changes to a particular feature and updating the snapshot without checking for other breakages. If the snapshot diff is large, it will likely not receive as thorough a review…

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…