When kicking off a new project last week, I decided to give styled-components a try. Some of the benefits of CSS-in-JS libraries like styled-components are the co-location of component styles with their respective components and the ability to leverage JavaScript in writing style rules. I noticed the styled-components documentation recommended using their babel plugin to […]
How to Send Email from React Without a Backend
I recently worked on a project where I needed to be able to let users submit feedback via a web form. The goal was to have submitted feedback sent as email to a designated email address. This project was going to be a static site built using React, however, without any backend to handle email. […]
How to Set up Pug File Linting with Gulp
Update (11/12/18): The Pug file linting tool mentioned below, gulp-pug-linter, now supports a “fail on exit” mode and custom reporting options, which makes the custom Gulp lint reporter strategy below unneeded. See the gulp-pug-linter documentation for more details. I recently set up Pug file linting for a Node.js/Express project at work that was already using […]
How to Automate Pulling in Random Images from Unsplash for Prototypes
Just because something is a quick prototype for a web application doesn’t mean we don’t want it to look good, right? I often use Unsplash images in prototypes and CodePen pens since I’m never disappointed by the image quality. I even have some of my own images up there just for fun. I always want each […]
Favorite Web Development Podcasts of 2016
Looking back on 2016, I’ve realized that I’ve continued to lean on podcasts to help stay up to date on web development trends and best practices. Here are my favorites for 2016! Shop Talk Show: This one also was in my previous podcast faves list. I like the varying aspects of front end development and […]
Ten Reasons I Use CodePen for Prototyping
I have really been loving CodePen lately for prototyping. Whether I’m working on a unique page layout for a client project or trying out something in React, there is something great about being able to dig in and get started right away on a project without having to worry about build tools, dependencies, deployment strategies, and […]