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 the Babel plugin. Nullability in GraphQL: Embracing nullability early on helps with the flexibility of your API, optimistic UI, avoiding breaking changes, and much more. Read more about how fields should only be made non-nullable with great intention. Imperative vs Declarative Programming: This Article by Tyler McGinnis is by far the clearest explanation of the difference between imperative and declarative programming I have read. Complete with real world metaphors, and a great place to wrap your head around the topic. The WebAIM Million: WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) is a great resource for increasing accessibility on the web. Earlier this year they surveyed one million websites and identified the most common accessibility errors, low hanging fruit, and some correlation amongst errors.

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. ...

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge 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. ...