Generate Strongly Typed React Components with GraphQL

Mat Warger API Development, Articles, AWS, Development Technologies & Tools, GraphQL, JavaScript, Programming 1 Comment

When developing in React, using a type system (like Typescript or Flow) can be a great help. You can be sure that your props and state are what you expect, at build-time, and code your components to match.

But what happens when youโ€™re calling to an API to fetch some data, and the shape of that data is what really matters? Maybe the data get passed as props to a child component? You can create types for this, sure, but are they correct? Probably not! Or at least, probably not for long! Things change. Wouldnโ€™t it be great if your types changed too?

In this post, weโ€™re going to take a simple component from zero type awareness to fully typed, with local variables and GraphQL queries included, with a simple workflow. Grab a cup of coffee and a snack, and letโ€™s see how this we can use GraphQL to generate type-safe components in React.

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Life as a Software Consultant

John Boardman Articles, Consulting, Keyhole, Opinion Leave a Comment

I’ve been in the field of programming professionally since 1990. I started out as a corporate employee for 14 years, then as a consultant, back to an employee, and finally settled with consulting. In both positions, I’ve worked with small, medium, large, and huge Fortune 50 corporations. There are many similarities between being an employee and a consultant, but there are also some significant differences.

In this blog, I’ll explore what life has been like in each role and hopefully give some perspective to others who might just be starting out. Keep in mind when I write “employee,” I am specifically targeting programmers.

Hello Micronaut

Rik Scarborough Articles, Java, Microservices, Testing Leave a Comment

From some of my previous posts, you can get the idea that I promote the idea of developing maintainable code rapidly. So I was pretty excited when I learned that the same group that was responsible for Grails was working on a similar project for Web Services. Hello, Micronaut.

In this post, I provide an introduction to the Micronaut framework and its features to provide a foundation for you to try it out yourself.

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Improving Performance in Enterprise Web Applications

Zach Gardner Articles, Opinion, Programming

Every team that builds a large web application can generally pick from the following: delivering application functionality on time, with high quality, or high performance. Teams can pick one or two of the options, but they can’t pick all three.

Most teams opt to only focus on performance if and when it becomes a problem. This, unfortunately, can be far too late for some projects. Anyone who has been in the industry can empathize with both sides of the equation – choosing to defer performance concerns, as well as seeing the negative impact it can have on the success of the product as a whole.

It is a lesson I’ve learned from hard experience, so I want to make sure others can learn from my mistakes. In this post, I suggest a handful of principles that help to find a happy medium for delivering high-quality software applications while focusing on performance.

Significant improvements can be realized even if only one or two of the principles are applied. Applying all of them, of course, will produce the best results.