In this post, I am going to demonstrate how to set up a simple Next.js web application. Next.js is a heavily opinionated JavaScript framework, in that it has a lot of conventions and recommended tools built into its design.
We’ll use Next.js version 14.2.2 to set up the groundwork for a simple web application. By “web application,” I mean an application that is designed primarily to collect input from a user in a web browser and return some output generated from that input.
The command line is a powerful tool in software development. Regardless of whether you are comfortable working within a shell or if you prefer a GUI, there are likely scenarios that still require you to open a terminal and type out some commands.
This should not surprise us โ many tools solely support Command-Line Interface (CLI) interaction โ but over time, the efforts required to keep track of each new commandโs syntax can add up. If youโre anything like me, you might memorize only the commands that you use most frequently, resigning yourself to searching through documentation for the rest whenever you need them….
Attention: This article was published over 2 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.Welcome back to GenAI in the Enterprise with Zach Gardner! Today, we host Principal Consultant, Michael Eaton. Michael got his first computer right out …
Iโve been developing JavaScript through all of the major existential changes weโve had. Browser wars? I remember those. Trying to make a complex application before Firebug? Oh yeah, tell me about it. Having to roll my own AJAX request by hand? Vividly remember.
Something that I experienced in all of my large JS projects before the last few years was an eventual point of no return, a metaphorical event horizon, beyond which the amount of time it took to build the code locally as well as on the CI/CD system was just simply too long.
All projects start fine, but as they grow and evolve and change over time, the amount of build time seems to creep up until it becomes inimical to deploying and testing changes in any reasonable time frame. Further, it becomes very difficult to onboard new developers as any change they make is not isolated, and must take into account all of the other code in the app. Granted, frameworks and libraries like React do help to some extent, but there are no clean-cut boundaries on the source code with different features, it always had to be by convention.
It was during a project a few years ago that I finally put my foot down and decided that something needed to be done. Researching how other architects were doing it, I came across JavaScript monorepos. I was familiar with the concept of monorepos from my research on how Google structures their code base (they have two repos, one for YouTube and one for everything else, no joke), but had never thought to apply that same principle to JavaScript. So I dove in head first, made a lot of mistakes, iterated, and finally got to a place where I feel comfortable sharing my lessons learned.
This blog post is not an extensive study, but it is enough to get you interested in a way to solve two common problems we all have (i.e. sluggish build times and inability to effectively onboard new devs due to lack of feature separation), and give you enough of a context around how I approached the problem to determine how you should proceed.
In this post, Iโll survey a convenient JavaScript math.js library approach for converting a numeric value having a unit to a value for another unit. Iโll show how to convert a number associated with a unit to a value having another unit, add custom units and conversions, and evaluate textual expressions containing values with units. To wrap up, weโll walk through a few practical use cases.
By the end of this post, I hope you are inspired to use math.js in your projects. Itโs a powerful tool in the right scenarios. With that, letโs get started.