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Dev Discussions: James Perkins of RollYourTweet on How to Create a Successful SaaS

Developer advocate and software engineer James Perkins of RollYourTweet.com has some sage advice for anyone looking to create the next big app: In a recent discussion with CoderPad’s Corbin Crutchley, James talks about his experience with creating a SaaS application and the lessons he learned from creating RollYourTweet. He doesn’t mince words – the people who think your tech stack is cool probably are not going to be the people who are going to use it. More importantly, they’re not going to be the ones paying for it. The only reason users care about the technology you use is that it improves the product and their experience.

Development

Integration Tests vs. Unit Tests: Why Integration Tests Matter More

In the hierarchy of things developers like to do, writing tests falls at about the “necessary evil” level. Like eating a heaping pile of spinach, we know it’s good for us–but getting motivated to do it can be a struggle. Of course running the proper tests saves us a whole lot of time and money fixing bugs down the line, but even then there are usually a million other things we’d rather do than write tests. Luckily for us, many other software developers also didn’t like doing it, so they created lots of automated testing tools to make it easier. These days you can find a tool for just about any testing type and programming language.

Development

A Beginner’s Guide to JavaScript Debugging in Chrome

Did you know your web browser can do more than allow you to doom scroll 24-hour news services, find all your dev questions answered on StackOverflow, and discover hilarious pictures of cats? It also works as an excellent tool for debugging your front-end JavaScript. No longer will you have to rely on adding and deleting hundreds of console.log(“this is another debugging message”); to see what your code is doing. Instead, you can leverage tools like Chrome’s DevTools to see what your JavaScript is doing in real-time as you move around the screen. You can set breakpoints, view console logs, check variable values, and more.

Development

Open Source Security: How Safe are Your Dependencies?

Is the next Log4J or OpenSSL disaster lurking in one of your open source dependencies? If you happened to miss out on those particular catastrophes, here’s a quick recap: Log4J is a popular logging library used in many enterprise applications to populate server logs. The Log4Shell vulnerability that was recently discovered in the Log4J library “ allows third-party servers to submit software code that can perform all kinds of actions on the targeted computer. This opens the door for nefarious activities such as stealing sensitive information, taking control of the targeted system, and slipping malicious content to other users communicating with the affected server .” Patches were quickly released to fix it, but not before malicious hackers conducted thousands of attempts to exploit it .

Development

Dev Discussions: Ryan Carniato of SolidJS on Building “The Tesla of JavaScript UI Frameworks”

CoderPad’s Corbin Crutchley recently sat down with Ryan Carniato to discuss his work on the hyper-performant UI library, SolidJS – which Ryan dubs “ The Tesla of Javascript UI Frameworks ” for its efficiency and performance. It’s not often you come across a programmer who used to be a touring musician – but Ryan has experience both slinging code with SolidJS as well as some sweet tunes with his band Mr. Solid ( both named after a tasty Canadian treat ).

Development

Developer Diaries: How We Built a Better Browser-Based IDE with Monaco

Integrated development environments (IDEs) are probably the most important tool we use as software developers and engineers. Using another tool, like a notepad or word processor, would be like trying to hammer a nail with your fist. That’s why our team just spent a good chunk of time working to improve the code editor in the pads that software engineering candidates use to complete technical assessments – but it was anything but an easy feat.

Development

Rules of React’s useEffect

React’s useEffect is a powerful API with lots of capabilities, and therefore flexibility. Unfortunately, this flexibility often leads to abuse and misuse, which can greatly damage an app’s stability. The good news is that if you follow a set of rules designated to protect you during coding, your application can be secure and performant. No, we’re not talking about React’s “ Rules of Hooks ”, which includes rules such as:

Development

Why React 18 Broke Your App

You’ve just gotten done with your React 18 upgrade , and, after some light QA testing, don’t find anything. “An easy upgrade,” you think. Unfortunately, down the road, you receive some internal bug reports from other developers that make it sound like your debounce hook isn’t working quite right. You decide to make a minimal reproduction and create a demo of said hook. You expect it to throw an “alert” dialog after a second of waiting, but weirdly, the dialog never runs at all.

Development

How to Upgrade to React 18

React 18 is the latest in a long line of major releases of React. With it you gain access to: new features for Suspense , new useId , useSyncExternalStore , and useDeferredValue hooks, as well as the new startTransition API. While React 18 is not yet a stable release, testing out your application can be useful. Like with previous major releases of React, React 18 is a fairly easy migration for most apps. While Strict Mode has received some changes that may impact your app, and automatic batching may introduce some new edge cases, they only impact apps that don’t follow the Rules of React properly .

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