Practical tips for approaching your work with mindfulness, ease, and less anxiety
Work means different things from person to person depending on their life circumstances. To some people, work means their job. To others, work means their family life, caring for loved ones, or struggling with health issues. Regardless of what work means to you, humans follow a similar pattern with their work. Put effort in, do whatever it takes, and receive results. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
I believe as individuals, the way we view work is largely shaped by our upbringing and the attitudes of our parents. I, for example, was raised on a family farm and taught to value hard…
A quick guide to deploying a Gatsby site to an S3 website and serve over HTTPS using CloudFront.
In case you aren’t familiar with Gatsby, it is a great tool for building fast and performant websites. It is a static site generator that allows you to build sites using React. Gatsby also leverages GraphQL to allow you to easily combine data from multiple sources like a WordPress blog or a Shopify store.
The number one feature of Gatsby is definitely performance. Gatsby sites are served up to users in milliseconds and navigating around is designed to be a smooth and responsive experience. Another nice feature of using Gatsby is there is a large existing library of plugins, themes…
A walkthrough of how to use S3 as image storage for a NodeJS/Express application.
If you’ve ever built an application that handles image uploads from users then you are probably aware that at least to start with you can try storing those images in your application’s database. The problem you will eventually run into is that this method will not scale efficiently as your application grows.
The more efficient and cost-effective option is to use AWS’s S3 service for storing the image files. Using S3 is a very low-cost option. Effectively, all you are paying for is transferring files into an S3 bucket and serving those images to your users. It is important to…
A quick introduction and guide to building your own blog site with Next.JS
In case you are not familiar with it yet, Next.JS is a popular React framework. This framework allows you to build React applications capable of static site generation and server-side rendering with no configuration required.
The major benefit of using static site generation or server-side rendering is that it is much better for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and you’ll notice the initial page load is much faster than a typical React application. …
A getting started guide for building real-time applications with React and Socket.io
Some use cases for web applications require real-time updates from the server. One such example is a chat application. If you have multiple users chatting together you could refresh updates from the server, but there is a cleaner solution that will push updates from the server to the UI. Sockets make this possible. And lucky for us developers there is a library called Socket.IO that makes working with sockets simple.
In this article, we will walk through a simple example of a real-time chat application built with React hooks and Socket.io. …
A quick guide for setting up a new React project with a pipeline for deployments to an S3/CloudFormation site with HTTPS.
Setting up a new React project isn’t something developers typically do regularly so it’s easy to forget all the steps involved. This article is meant to serve as a guide for starting a new React project, setting up a pipeline in Bitbucket for deployments, and setting up a static site in AWS that serves your project through HTTPS.
At the end of this example, you will have a project that is fully development ready. Our project will meet the following criteria:
- Set up in version control
- Automatically run a build and unit tests on each commit
- Ability to push a…
Are you building mobile applications with React Native and want to add map components to your project? Look no further, we will be tackling that topic in this article. We will be walking through an example of building a React Native app with the Mapbox SDK.
In case you are not familiar with Mapbox, it is a map service that you can develop on pretty much any platform. For this article, we will be leveraging the React Native SDK which makes building maps a breeze. Mapbox has a very generous free tier that covers up to 25,000 monthly active users…
A look at how to use MobX to manage state in your React applications.
As React developers we have many options for how to manage state in our applications. That is one of the nice things about React in that it is relatively unopinionated about how you do most things with state management being one of those where you have the freedom to choose what suits your application the best.
If you have a relatively small application that has a relatively small amount of data or state that is shared across different components then you most likely can get by with just using Context which is built into React. …
A guide to set up a simple REST API with NodeJS, Express, and PostgreSQL
Are you curious about how to create an API with NodeJS and PostgreSQL? In this article, I will be walking through an example of how to set up a local PostgreSQL instance and a NodeJS API to create, read, update, and delete data from that database.
I have been working with NodeJS APIs in both development and production applications for several years now and there are quite a few benefits to the framework. It is typically faster to get something up and going initially just because the framework is so simple. The execution speed is typically great as long you’re…
A quick guide to setting up a Lambda function to receive messages from an SQS messaging queue with the Serverless Framework.
Serverless computing is an exciting technology and has many practical applications for building scalable applications in a cloud environment. One extremely practical use case is receiving messages in a messaging queue. In this article, I will be building an example to demonstrate this by connecting an SQS messaging queue to a Lambda function which can be accomplished quite simply by utilizing the Serverless Framework.
Large web applications have many moving pieces and some have functionality that is better performed behind the scenes rather than making users wait. One example of this is file processing. If you are accepting files from…
Matthew Brown
I am the Director of I.T. at IN10T. My passions include software development, anything technology related, and cars.
