Johnny Bell

Prettier not formatting code on save in Visual Studio Code? - I've come across the same issue and took me a long time googling around to find the issue.

It is actually a very simple fix. Add the below to your Visual Studio Code settings.json

"[javascript]": {
    "editor.formatOnSave": true
},
"[javascriptreact]": {
  "editor.formatOnSave": true
}

I've used both Vue.js and React and I would stick with React. I know that Vue.js seems easier to write and its much faster to pick up however as you mentioned above React has way more ready made components you can just plugin, and the community for React is very big.

It might be a bit more of a steep learning curve for your friend to learn React over Vue.js but I think in the long run its the better option.

When I switched to Visual Studio Code 12 months ago from PhpStorm I was in love, it was great. However after using VS Code for a year, I see myself switching back and forth between WebStorm and VS Code. The VS Code plugins are great however I notice Prettier, auto importing of components and linking to the definitions often break, and I have to restart VS Code multiple times a week and sometimes a day.

We use Ruby here so I do like that Visual Studio Code highlights that for me out of the box, with WebStorm I'd need to probably also install RubyMine and have 2 IDE's going at the same time.

Should I stick with Visual Studio Code, or switch to something else? #help

So if you look through my decisions you will see I recently wrote a decision about moving from Netlify to Buddy and Amazon S3.

I want to write another decision saying that I tried this out and actually moved back to Netlify. Buddy was great until they deleted my account and all my pipelines I setup without warning me because I didn't login for a month.

Netlify is amazing and way easier to setup, support is great and they have so many amazing options... I did learn things about Amazon S3 by moving over to there but I'm sticking with Netlify for the long run now.

For any project that anyone creates these days (myself included) you want to see how many visitors your site gets, where they come from, what they clicked etc. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is obviously Google Analytics I think that 99% of websites out there have Google Analytics embedded into their code.

I am no different, I wanted to see how the users were getting to my site, what they clicked, how long they were on there for etc. etc. So I added Google Analytics to my site too... Which was really cool and free, but the longer I used Google Analytics I felt that I wanted more insight. Like what if I could actually see how users interacted with my site.

I came across FullStory and this is exactly what I wanted, it will record all your user sessions and you get to replay them in full. So you can see exactly how a user uses your site, what they click, and see if your site might benefit from some A/B tests or changes. - I am on the free plan, so it doesn't need to cost you a fortune.

Both Google Analytics and FullStory allow you to login with your G Suite account which helps you keep your accounts all linked.

With FullStory and Google Analytics I feel that I have the perfect insight into how the users are using my site, and all the analytics around how they get there. Its a perfect combo

So when starting a new project you generally have your go to tools to get your site up and running locally, and some scripts to build out a production version of your site. Create React App is great for that, however for my projects I feel as though there is to much bloat in Create React App and if I use it, then I'm tied to React, which I love but if I want to switch it up to Vue or something I want that flexibility.

So to start everything up and running I clone my personal Webpack boilerplate - This is still in Webpack 3, and does need some updating but gets the job done for now. So given the name of the repo you may have guessed that yes I am using Webpack as my bundler I use Webpack because it is so powerful, and even though it has a steep learning curve once you get it, its amazing.

The next thing I do is make sure my machine has Node.js configured and the right version installed then run Yarn. I decided to use Yarn because when I was building out this project npm had some shortcomings such as no .lock file. I could probably move from Yarn to npm but I don't really see any point really.

I use Babel to transpile all of my #ES6 to #ES5 so the browser can read it, I love Babel and to be honest haven't looked up any other transpilers because Babel is amazing.

Finally when developing I have Prettier setup to make sure all my code is clean and uniform across all my JS files, and ESLint to make sure I catch any errors or code that could be optimized.

I'm really happy with this stack for my local env setup, and I'll probably stick with it for a while.

We are always building new features and replacing old code at StackShare. Lately we have been building out new features for the frontend, and removing a lot of old jQuery code (sorry jQuery but it's time to go).

We've mainly been using React, ES6 and JavaScript on the frontend to build out the components, and we've been slowly removing some legacy MobX and using GraphQL and Apollo for our state management, if we need to control state further than GraphQL and Apollo allows us to we use just plain React with #context , or the new fancy React #hooks🎣 .

As we've moved towards the above tech, its really made smashing out new features and updating legacy code super fast, and really fun!

I recently moved my portfolio to Amazon S3 and I needed a new way to cache and SSL my site as Amazon S3 does not come with this right out of the box. I tried Amazon CloudFront as I was already on Amazon S3 I thought this would be super easy and straight forward to setup... It was not, I was unable to get this working even though I followed all the online steps and even reached out for help to Amazon.

I'd used CloudFlare in the past, and thought let me see if I can set up CloudFlare on an Amazon S3 bucket. The setup for this was so basic and easy... I had it setup with caching and SSL within 5 minutes, and it was 100% free.

When I first built my portfolio I used GitHub for the source control and deployed directly to Netlify on a push to master. This was a perfect setup, I didn't need any knowledge about #DevOps or anything, it was all just done for me.

One of the issues I had with Netlify was I wanted to gzip my JavaScript files, I had this setup in my #Webpack file, however Netlify didn't offer an easy way to set this.

Over the weekend I decided I wanted to know more about how #DevOps worked so I decided to switch from Netlify to Amazon S3. Instead of creating any #Git Webhooks I decided to use Buddy for my pipeline and to run commands. Buddy is a fantastic tool, very easy to setup builds, copying the files to my Amazon S3 bucket, then running some #AWS console commands to set the content-encoding of the JavaScript files. - Buddy is also free if you only have a few pipelines, so I didn't need to pay anything 🤙🏻.

When I made these changes I also wanted to monitor my code, and make sure I was keeping up with the best practices so I implemented Code Climate to look over my code and tell me where there code smells, issues, and other issues I've been super happy with it so far, on the free tier so its also free.

I did plan on using Amazon CloudFront for my SSL and cacheing, however it was overly complex to setup and it costs money. So I decided to go with the free tier of CloudFlare and it is amazing, best choice I've made for caching / SSL in a long time.

For my portfolio websites and my personal OpenSource projects I had started exclusively using React and JavaScript so I needed a way to track any errors that we're happening for my users that I didn't uncover during my personal UAT.

I had narrowed it down to two tools LogRocket and Sentry (I also tried Bugsnag but it did not make the final two). Before I get into this I want to say that both of these tools are amazing and whichever you choose will suit your needs well.

I firstly decided to go with LogRocket the fact that they had a recorded screen capture of what the user was doing when the bug happened was amazing... I could go back and rewatch what the user did to replicate that error, this was fantastic. It was also very easy to setup and get going. They had options for React and Redux.js so you can track all your Redux.js actions. I had a fairly large Redux.js store, this was ended up being a issue, it killed the processing power on my machine, Chrome ended up using 2-4gb of ram, so I quickly disabled the Redux.js option.

After using LogRocket for a month or so I decided to switch to Sentry. I noticed that Sentry was openSorce and everyone was talking about Sentry so I thought I may as well give it a test drive. Setting it up was so easy, I had everything up and running within seconds. It also gives you the option to wrap an errorBoundry in React so get more specific errors. The simplicity of Sentry was a breath of fresh air, it allowed me find the bug that was shown to the user and fix that very simply. The UI for Sentry is beautiful and just really clean to look at, and their emails are also just perfect.

I have decided to stick with Sentry for the long run, I tested pretty much all the JS error loggers and I find Sentry the best.