Redux

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.

Earlier this year, we started developing a new app to help our runners deliver groceries to our customers. We chose React Native over a native app or a PWA and are really happy with it. So far, we really like what we are seeing. Development speed is fast and the tooling is awesome. The “learn once, write anywhere”-promise is really fulfilled and when we ran our project for the first time on iOS after a few weeks of development, we were excited to see how well it worked and what it looked like.

Read our blog post to learn more about how we use React Native, TypeScript, Redux.js, RxJS, CodePush, styled-components, React Storybook, Jest, and Prettier to develop this app, as well as our thought of what else we will do with it at Picnic.

Onedot is building an automated data preparation service using probabilistic and statistical methods including artificial intelligence (AI). From the beginning, having a stable foundation while at the same time being able to iterate quickly was very important to us. Due to the nature of compute workloads we face, the decision for a functional programming paradigm and a scalable cluster model was a no-brainer. We started playing with Apache Spark very early on, when the platform was still in its infancy. As a storage backend, we first used Cassandra, but found out that it was not the optimal choice for our workloads (lots of rather smallish datasets, data pipelines with considerable complexity, etc.). In the end, we migrated dataset storage to Amazon S3 which proved to be much more adequate to our case. In the frontend, we bet on more traditional frameworks like React/Redux.js, Blueprint and a number of common npm packages of our universe. Because of the very positive experience with Scala (in particular the ability to write things very expressively, use immutability across the board, etc.) we settled with TypeScript in the frontend. In our opinion, a very good decision. Nowadays, transpiling is a common thing, so we thought why not introduce the same type-safety and mathematical rigour to the user interface?

I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

I'm building a new process management tool. I decided to build with Rails as my backend, using Sidekiq for background jobs. I chose to work with these tools because I've worked with them before and know that they're able to get the job done. They may not be the sexiest tools, but they work and are reliable, which is what I was optimizing for. For data stores, I opted for PostgreSQL and Redis. Because I'm planning on offering dashboards, I wanted a SQL database instead of something like MongoDB that might work early on, but be difficult to use as soon as I want to facilitate aggregate queries.

On the front-end I'm using Vue.js and vuex in combination with #Turbolinks. In effect, I want to render most pages on the server side without key interactions being managed by Vue.js . This is the first project I'm working on where I've explicitly decided not to include jQuery . I have found React and Redux.js more confusing to setup. I appreciate the opinionated approach from the Vue.js community and that things just work together the way that I'd expect. To manage my javascript dependencies, I'm using Yarn .

For CSS frameworks, I'm using #Bulma.io. I really appreciate it's minimal nature and that there are no hard javascript dependencies. And to add a little spice, I'm using #font-awesome.

Working on a project recently, wanted an easy modern frontend to work with, decoupled from our backend. To get things going quickly, decided to go with React, Redux.js, redux-saga, Bootstrap.

On the backend side, Go is a personal favourite, and wanted to minimize server overheads so went with a #serverless architecture leveraging AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon DynamoDB, etc.

For IDE/tooling I tend to stick to the #JetBrains tools: WebStorm / Goland.

Obviously using Git, with GitLab private repo's for managing code/issues/etc.

Earlier this year we decided to go "all-in" on GraphQL to provide our front-end API. We needed a stable client library to power our React app. We decided to use Apollo Client for a few reasons:

1) Stability 2) Maturity 3) Heaps of features 4) Great documentation (with use cases) 5) Support for server-side rendering 6) Allowed us to stop using Redux and Mobx

Overall we've had great success with this library, along with a few minor hiccups and work arounds, but no show stoppers. If you are coming from Redux.js land, it takes a bit of time to settle into a new way of thinking about how your data is fetched and flows through your React app. This part has been the biggest learning curve of anything to do with GraphQL.

One of the downsides to Apollo Client, once you build a larger application, (past the size of most of the documented use cases and sample apps) the state management tends to get distributed through various places; and not just components. Apollo Client has a state management feature that relies on a normalised local cache. Mastering the knowledge of how this works is key to getting the most out of the library and to architecting your component hierarchy properly.

#FrontEndFrameworks

As a frontend engineer on the Algorithms & Analytics team at Stitch Fix, I work with data scientists to develop applications and visualizations to help our internal business partners make data-driven decisions. I envisioned a platform that would assist data scientists in the data exploration process, allowing them to visually explore and rapidly iterate through their assumptions, then share their insights with others. This would align with our team's philosophy of having engineers "deploy platforms, services, abstractions, and frameworks that allow the data scientists to conceive of, develop, and deploy their ideas with autonomy", and solve the pain of data exploration.

The final product, code-named Dora, is built with React, Redux.js and Victory, backed by Elasticsearch to enable fast and iterative data exploration, and uses Apache Spark to move data from our Amazon S3 data warehouse into the Elasticsearch cluster.

We are in the middle of a change of the stack on the front end. So we used Backbone.js with Marionette. Then we also created our own implementation of a Flux kind of flow. We call it eb-flux. We have worked with Marionette for a long time. Then at some point we start evolving and end up having a kind of Redux.js-style architecture, but with Marionette.

But then maybe one and a half years ago, we started moving into React and that's why we created the Eventbrite design system. It's a really nice project that probably could be open sourced. It's a library of components for our React components.

With the help of that library, we are building our new stack with React and sometimes Redux when it's necessary.