Tech Guides - Web Development

Dart is an open-source, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language developed by Google in 2011. Dart uses a 'C' style syntax and optionally transcompiles into JavaScript. It is used for both client side and server-side web development. Dart is also being used for Native and Cross-platform mobile development. In spite of all the capabilities that Dart possesses, there are few rumors about Dart heading nowhere? Are there any truth to these rumors? Through this article, we will see how Dart can turn the tide around with some key new projects and application areas that are being explored recently. But first, let's talk about its recent TIOBE ranking - the de-facto standard for gauging the popularity of programming languages. The latest rankings show Dart at the 24th spot out of the 50 languages that TIOBE tracks, behind languages like R, Delphi, even Swift which was released in 2014, 3 years later after Dart was introduced. Even languages like Delphi and R have seen a recent spike in implementation across various application domain. Codementor ranks Dart at #1 in the list of programming languages one should not learn in 2018. They looked at community engagement, growth, and the job market to arrive at this conclusion. Source: Codementor.io The job trends for Dart also have been quite stagnant for some time. After a minor dip in between 2015-16, the job trends are now back at the 2014 mark. There has been neither any growth nor decline. The major cause of concern for Dart has been that very few companies are using Dart in their development stack. Other than Google backed websites such as AdWords, Google Fiber, Flutter etc, only few other major companies like Workiva, Adobe, Blossom have actively implemented Dart. The Job listings are also similar in number as in 2014, the developer salaries are pretty high. The lack of sustained growth balances that advantage out. Google had also shifted to TypeScript as the official language for it’s most popular front-end development framework Angular. This was also seen as a minor setback for Dart. When compared to other late entrants like Swift, is this a sign of worry for Dart? Source: ITJobswatch.uk The answer is a definitely 'No'. The reason being Dart’s ease of use, lack of boilerplates and extremely lightweight nature. Developers have termed it as a language for the long run. These predictions got a major boost when Google recently announced their latest Cross-Platform mobile development framework, Flutter which was written in Dart. The reviews of Flutter has also been encouraging since it paves way for simpler and native like mobile apps. The popularity of Flutter could mean a revival of Dart in the mobile development scenario. But Google might have even bigger aspirations with Dart. Google might be thinking of a possible replacement of its flagship Android operating system which is bugged by irregular update cycles due to multiple instances of it running on different devices. Google is developing an operating system called Fuchsia which is also being written in Dart. All of these point out to one single direction, Dart is here to stay. If everything goes as per Google's vision, Fuchsia will bring Dart to the forefront of mobile development.   **edited for better clarity on Dart’s comparison to other languages like Swift, Delphi and R and elaborated on Dart’s real world use cases. Read Next Why Google Dart Will Never Win The Battle For The Browser Building Games with HTML5 and Dart Google Fuchsia: What’s all the fuss about?

Superior user experience is becoming increasingly important for businesses as it helps them to engage users and boost brand loyalty. Front-end website and app development platforms, namely Bootstrap vs Material Design empower developers to create websites with a robust structure and advanced functionality, thereby delivering outstanding business solutions and unbeatable user experience. Both Twitter’s Bootstrap vs Material Design are used by developers to create functional and high-quality websites and apps. If you are an aspiring front-end developer, here’s a direct comparison between the two, so you can choose the one that’s better suited for your upcoming project. BootStrap Bootstrap is an open-source, intuitive, and powerful framework used for responsive mobile-first solutions on the web. For several years, Bootstrap has helped developers create splendid mobile-ready front-end websites. In fact, Bootstrap is the most popular  CSS framework as it’s easy to learn and offers a consistent design by using re-usable components. Let’s dive deeper into the pros and cons of Bootstrap. Pros High speed of development If you have limited time for the website or app development, Bootstrap is an ideal choice. It offers ready-made blocks of code that can get you started within no time. So, you don’t have to start coding from scratch. Bootstrap also provides ready-made themes, templates, and other resources that can be downloaded and customized to suit your needs, allowing you to create a unique website as quickly as possible. Bootstrap is mobile first Since July 1, 2019, Google started using mobile-friendliness as a critical ranking factor for all websites. This is because users prefer using sites that are compatible with the screen size of the device they are using. In other words, they prefer accessing responsive sites. Bootstrap is an ideal choice for responsive sites as it has an excellent fluid grid system and responsive utility classes that make the task at hand easy and quick. Enjoys  a strong community support Bootstrap has a huge number of resources available on its official website and enjoys immense support from the developers’ community. Consequently, it helps all developers fix issues promptly. At present, Bootstrap is being developed and maintained on GitHub by Mark Otto, currently Principal Design & Brand Architect at GitHub, with nearly 19 thousand commits and 1087 contributors. The team regularly releases updates to fix any new issues and improve the effectiveness of the framework. For instance, currently, the Bootstrap team is working on releasing version 4.3 that will drop jQuery for regular JavaScript. This is primarily because jQuery adds 30KB to the webpage size and is tricky to configure with bundlers like Webpack. Similarly, Flexbox is a new feature added to the Bootstrap 4 framework. In fact, Bootstrap version 4 is rich with features, such as a Flexbox-based grid, responsive sizing and floats, auto margins, vertical centering, and new spacing utilities. Further, you will find plenty of websites offering Bootstrap tutorials, a wide collection of themes, templates, plugins, and user interface kit that can be used as per your taste and nature of the project. Cons All Bootstrap sites look the same The Twitter team introduced Bootstrap with the objective of helping developers use a standardized interface to create websites within a short time. However, one of the major drawbacks of this framework is that all websites created using this framework are highly recognizable as Bootstrap sites. Open Airbnb, Twitter, Apple Music, or Lyft. They all look the same with bold headlines, rounded sans-serif fonts, and lots of negative space. Bootstrap sites can be heavy Bootstrap is notorious for adding unnecessary bloat to websites as the files generated are huge in size. This leads to longer loading time and battery draining issues. Further, if you delete them manually, it defeats the purpose of using the framework. So, if you use this popular front-end UI library in your project, make sure you pay extra attention to page weight and page speed. May not be suitable for simple websites Bootstrap may not be the right front-end framework for all types of websites, especially the ones that don’t need a full-fledged framework. This is because, Bootstrap’s theme packages are incredibly heavy with battery-draining scripts. Also, Bootstrap has CSS weighing in at 126KB and 29KB of JavaScript that can increase the site’s loading time. In such cases, Bootstrap alternatives, namely Foundation, Skeleton, Pure, and Semantic UI adaptable and lightweight frameworks that can meet your developmental needs and improve your site’s user-friendliness. Material Design When compared to Bootstrap vs Material Design is hard to customize and learn. However, this design language was introduced by Google in 2014 with the objective of enhancing Android app’s design and user interface. The language is quite popular among developers as it offers a quick and effective way for web development. It includes responsive transitions and animations, lighting and shadows effects, and grid-based layouts. When developing a website or app using Material Design, designers should play to its strengths but be wary of its cons. Let’s see why. Pros Offers numerous components  Material Design offers numerous components that provide a base design, guidelines, and templates. Developers can work on this to create a suitable website or application for the business. The Material Design concept offers the necessary information on how to use each component. Moreover, Material Design Lite is quite popular for its customization. Many designers are creating customized components to take their projects to the next level. Is compatible across various browsers Both Bootstrap vs Material Design have a sound browser compatibility as they are compatible across most browsers. Material Design supports Angular Material and React Material User Interface. It also uses the SASS preprocessor. Doesn’t require JavaScript frameworks Bootstrap completely depends on JavaScript frameworks. However, Material Design doesn’t need any JavaScript frameworks or libraries to design websites or apps. In fact, the platform provides a material design framework that allows developers to create innovative components such as cards and badges. Cons The animations and vibrant colors can be distracting Material Design extensively uses animated transitions and vibrant colors and images that help bring the interface to life. However, these animations can adversely affect the human brain’s ability to gather information. It is affiliated to Google Since Material Design is a Google-promoted framework, Android is its prominent adopter. Consequently, developers looking to create apps on a platform-independent UX may find it tough to work with Material Design. However, when Google introduced the language, it had broad vision for Material Design that encompasses many platforms, including iOS. The tech giant has several Google Material Design components for iOS that can be used to render interesting effects using a flexible header, standard material colors, typography, and sliding tabs Carries performance overhead Material Design extensively uses animations that carry a lot of overhead. For instance, effects like drop shadow, color fill, and transform/translate transitions can be jerky and unpleasant for regular users. Wrapping up: Should you use Bootstrap vs Material Design for your next web or app development project? Bootstrap is great for responsive, simple, and professional websites. It enjoys immense support and documentation, making it easy for developers to work with it. So, if you are working on a project that needs to be completed within a short time, opt for Bootstrap. The framework is mainly focused on creating responsive, functional, and high-quality websites and apps that enhance the user experience. Notice how these websites have used Bootstrap to build responsive and mobile-first sites. (Source: cssreel) (Source: Awwwards) Material Design, on the other hand, is specific as a design language and great for building websites that focus on appearance, innovative designs, and beautiful animations. You can use Material Design for your portfolio sites, for instance. The framework is pretty detailed and straightforward to use and helps you create websites with striking effects. Check out how these websites and apps use the customized themes, popups, and buttons of Material Design. (Source:  Nimbus 9) (Source: Digital Trends) What do you think? Which framework works better for you? Bootstrap vs Material Design. Let us know in the comments section below. Author Bio Gaurav Belani is a Senior SEO and Content Marketing Analyst at The 20 Media, a Content Marketing agency that specializes in data-driven SEO. He has more than seven years of experience in Digital Marketing and along with that loves to read and write about AI, Machine Learning, Data Science and much more about the emerging technologies. In his spare time, he enjoys watching movies and listening to music. Connect with him on Twitter and Linkedin. Material-UI v4 releases with CSS specificity, Classes boilerplate, migration to Typescript and more Warp: Rust’s new web framework Learn how to Bootstrap a Spring application [Tutorial] Bootstrap 5 to replace jQuery with vanilla JavaScript How to use Bootstrap grid system for responsive website design?  

JavaScript developers are keenly aware of the need to reduce the size of deployed assets, especially in today's world of single-page apps. This usually means running increasingly complex JavaScript codebases through build steps that produce a minified bundle for deployment. However, if you read a typical tutorial on setting up a build tool like Browserify or Webpack, you'll see numerous references to a variable called process.env.NODE_ENV. Tutorials always talk about how this needs to be set to a value like "production" in order to produce a properly optimized bundle, but most articles never really spell out why this value matters and how it relates to build optimization. Here's an explanation of why process.env.NODE_ENV is used and how it fits into the typical build process. Operating system environment variables are widely used as a method of configuring applications, especially as a way to activate behavior based on different deployment environments (such as development vs testing vs production). Node.js exposes the current process's environment variables to the script as an object called process.env. From there, the Express web server framework popularized using an environment variable called NODE_ENV as a flag to indicate whether the server should be running in "development" mode vs "production" mode. At runtime, the script looks up that value by checking process.env.NODE_ENV. Because it was used within the Node ecosystem, browser-focused libraries also started using it to determine what environment they were running in, and using it to control optimizations and debug mode behavior. For example, React uses it as the equivalent of a C preprocessor #ifdef to act as conditional checking for debug logging and perf tracking, roughly like this: function someInternalReactFunction() { // do actual work part 1 if(process.env.NODE_ENV === "development") { // do debug-only work, like recording perf stats } // do actual work part 2 } If process.env.NODE_ENV is set to "production", all those if clauses will evaluate to false, and the potentially expensive debug code won't run. In addition, in conjunction with a tool like UglifyJS that does minification and removal of dead code blocks, a clause that is surrounded with if(process.env.NODE_ENV === "development") will become dead code in a production build and be stripped out, thus reducing bundled code size and execution time. However, because the NODE_ENV environment variable and the corresponding process.env.NODE_ENV runtime field are normally server-only concepts, by default those values do not exist in client-side code. This is where build tools such as Webpack's DefinePlugin or the Browserify Envify transform come in, which perform search-and-replace operations on the original source code. Since these build tools are doing transformation of your code anyway, they can force the existence of global values such as process.env.NODE_ENV. (It's also important to note that because DefinePlugin in particular does a direct text replacement, the value given to DefinePlugin must include actual quotes inside of the string itself. Typically, this is done either with alternate quotes, such as '"production"', or by using JSON.stringify("production")). Here's the key: the build tool could set that value to anything, based on any condition that you want, as you're defining your build configuration. For example, I could have a webpack.production.config.js Webpack config file that always uses the DefinePlugin to set that value to "production" throughout the client-side bundle. It wouldn't have to be checking the actual current value of the "real" process.env.NODE_ENV variable while generating the Webpack config, because as the developer I would know that any time I'm doing a "production" build, I would want to set that value in the client code to "production'. This is where the "code I'm running as part of my build process" and "code I'm outputting from my build process" worlds come together. Because your build script is itself most likely to be JavaScript code running under Node, it's going to have process.env.NODE_ENV available to it as it runs. Because so many tools and libraries already share the convention of using that field's value to determine their dev-vs-production status, the common convention is to use the current value of that field inside the build script as it's running to also determine the value of that field as applied to the client code being transformed. Ultimately, it all comes down to a few key points: NODE_ENV is a system environment variable that Node exposes into running scripts. It's used by convention to determine dev-vs-prod behavior, by both server tools, build scripts, and client-side libraries. It's commonly used inside of build scripts (such as Webpack config generation) as both an input value and an output value, but the tie between the two is still just convention. Build tools generally do a transform step on the client-side code, replace any references to process.env.NODE_ENV with the desired value, and the resulting code will contain dead code blocks as debug-only code is now inside of an if(false)-type condition, ensuring that code doesn't execute at runtime. Minifier tools such as UglifyJS will strip out the dead code blocks, leaving the production bundle smaller. So, the next time you see process.env.NODE_ENV mentioned in a build script, hopefully you'll have a much better idea why it's there. About the author Mark Erikson is a software engineer living in southwest Ohio, USA, where he patiently awaits the annual heartbreak from the Reds and the Bengals. Mark is author of the Redux FAQ, maintains the React/Redux Links list and Redux Addons Catalog, and occasionally tweets at @acemarke. He can be usually found in the Reactiflux chat channels, answering questions about React and Redux. He is also slightly disturbed by the number of third-person references he has written in this bio!

Node.js is one of the easiest platforms for prototyping and agile development. It’s used by large companies looking to scale their products quickly. However, using a platform on its own isn’t enough for most big projects today. Logging is also a key part of ensuring your web or mobile app runs smoothly for all users. Application logging is the practice of recording information about your application’s runtime. These files are usually saved a logging platform which helps identify potential problems. While no app is perfect 100% of the time, logging helps developers cut down on errors and even cyber attacks. The nature of software is complex. We can’t always predict how an application will react to data, errors, or system changes. Logging helps us better understand our own programs. So how do you handle logging in Node.js specifically? Following are some of the best practices for logging in Node.js to get the best results. 1. Understand the Regulations Let’s discuss the current legal regulations about what you can and cannot log. You should never log sensitive information or personal data. That means excluding credentials like passwords, credit card number or even email addresses. Recent changes to regulation like Europe’s GDPR make this even more essential. You don’t want to get tied up in the legal red tape of sensitive data. When in doubt, stick to the 3 things that are needed for a solid log message: timestamp, log level, and description. Beyond this, you don’t need any extensive framework. 2. Take advantage of Winston Node.js is built with a logging framework known as Winston. Winston is defined as transport for your logs, and you can install it directly into your application. Follow this guide to install Winston on your own. Winston is a powerful tool that comes with different logging levels with values. You can fully customize this console as well with colors, messages, and output details. The most recent version available is 3.0.0, but always make sure you have the latest edition to keep your app running smoothly. 3. Add Morgan In addition to Winston, Morgan is an HTTP request logger that collects server logs and standardizes them. Think of it as a logger simplification. Morgan. While you’re free to use Morgan on its own, most developers choose to use it with Winston since they make a powerful team. Morgan also works well with express.js. 4. Consider the Intel Package While Winston and Morgan are a great combination, they’re not your only option. Intel is another package solution with similar features as well as unique options. While you’ll see a lot of overlap in what they offer, Intel also includes a stack trace object. These features will come in handy when it’s time to actually debug. Because it gives a stack trace as a JSON object, it’s much easier to pass messages up the logger chain. Think of Intel like the breadcrumbs taking your developers to the error. 5. Use Environment Variables You’ll hear a lot of discussion about configuration management in the Node.js world. Decoupling your code from services and database is no straightforward process. In Node.js, it’s best to use environment variables. You can also look up values from process.env within your code. To determine which environment your program is running on, look up the NODE_ENV variables. You can also use the nconf module found here. 6. Choose a Style Guide No developer wants to spend time reading through lines of code only to have to change the spaces to tabs, reformat the braces, etc. Style guides are a must, especially when logging on Node.js. If you’re working with a team of developers, it’s time to decide on a team style guide that everyone sticks to across the board. When the code is written in a consistent style, you don’t have to worry about opinionated developers fighting for a say. It doesn’t matter which style you stick with, just make sure you can actually stick to it. The Googe style guide for Java is a great place to start if you can’t make a single decision. 7. Deal with Errors Finally, accept that errors will happen and prepare for them. You don’t want an error to bring down your entire software or program. Exception management is key. Use an asyn structure to cleanly handle any errors. Whether the app simply restarts or moves on to the next stage, make sure something happens. Users need their errors to be handled. As you can see, there are a few best practices to keep in mind when logging in Node.js. Don’t rely on your developers alone to debug the platform. Set a structure in place to handle these problems as they arise. Your users expect quality experience every time. Make sure you can deliver with these tips above. Author Bio Ashley Lipman Content marketing specialist Ashley is an award-winning writer who discovered her passion for providing creative solutions for building brands online. Since her first high school award in Creative Writing, she continues to deliver awesome content through various niches. Introducing Zero Server, a zero-configuration server for React, Node.js, HTML, and Markdown 5 reasons you should learn Node.js Deploying Node.js apps on Google App Engine is now easy

Clearly, there’s lot of competition for web designer jobs, - with the salary rising each year - so it’s crucial you find a way to make your resume stand out. You need to balance creativity with professionalism, all while making sure your experience, personality, and skills shine through. Over the years, people have created numerous resumes for web designers and everybody knows what it takes to get that job. Follow this guide to write a creative and attention-grabbing web designer resume. Note: All images in this article are courtesy of zety.com resume templates page and the guide. Format is a window to your mind Because you’re applying for a design position, the look and format of your resume is very important. It gives prospective employers a sense of your design philosophies. Use white space, and clear, legible fonts to help a hiring manager easily find your information. To stand apart from the crowd, avoid using a word processor to create your resume. Instead use InDesign or Illustrator to design something creative and less cookie-cutter like. Submit your resume in PDF format to avoid formatting errors that will ruin the look of your document. Sometimes a job posting will specifically forbid submitting in PDF though, so watch out for that. Highlight your Experience The key to writing a good experience section for a web designer is keeping it brief and relevant, while highlighting your career achievements. Add no more than three to five bullet points with measurable achievements per past position. Don’t just list your past company and when you worked there. “Discuss what you did and include some tangible accomplishments. If you created a custom graphic set for clients, mention that, and also what percentage were satisfied (hopefully it’s very high.) Prove you have the necessary experience to do the job well,” advises Terrence Wood, resume proofreader at Paper Fellows. Education Your education is not nearly as important as your experience, but you still need to present it right. That means using this section to talk about your strong points. Include coursework and achievements that are relevant to the job description. Maybe you wrote a column about web design in your college’s newspaper, things like this help you stand out to a hiring manager, especially if you are just starting your career in web design. Also, include the GPA here. Showcase your skills Everyone is going to list their skills, if you want that interview you need to do something to make yourself seem exceptional. The first thing you’ll do is take a good look at the job description and note what skills and responsibilities they mention. Now you know what skills to include, but including them is not enough. You need to prove you have them by giving examples of times you used them at past jobs. Don’t just list that you are proficient in Adobe Creative Suite, prove it by describing how you used it to tackle web design for 90% of client projects. Up the ante even more and include samples of your past work. This is a good spot to include your portfolio, any certifications that you have or anything that can help you let them know just how good you are at your job and confirm your skills. If you've had a predominantly freelance career, list the companies or individuals that you've worked for and include examples of work for each of them. You can do the same thing if you had a '9 to 5' career – simply list your previous jobs and show examples of your best work. It's a good idea to let your potential employers know about any future skills you plan to acquire. Use infographics You can give your resume a really unique look by using infographics, while still keeping it professional. Divide your resume layout into a grid with two columns and four or five rows. Now place one category of data into each square of your grid. Next, transform each section into an infographic. Use icons to represent different skills or awards. You can use your design software’s shape tools to create charts and graphs. Programs like Adobe InDesign can be used to create your infographics. You can also use Canva or Visme. Keep it professional It’s a great idea to inject some creativity into you resume. You want to stand out, and after all, it is a design resume. But it’s also important to balance that creativity with professionalism. A hiring manager will make some judgements about your personality based on how your resume looks. Be subtle in your creativity. Use colors that are easy on the eyes, and keep fonts reasonable. There can be a lot of beauty in simplicity. Stick to the basics, place content in an order familiar to recruiters to avoid making them have to work for the information they need. Remember that your primary goal is to communicate your information clearly. Write a cover letter Some people say that it's not really necessary but it's your chance to stand out. Maybe there is something that isn't on your resume or you want to seem more appealing and human – cover letter is a good chance to do all of that. Cover letter is a great place to elaborate how you'll be able to meet their needs. It's a good opportunity to also show them that you have done your research and know their company. Writing resources for your resume ViaWriting and Writing Populist: These are grammar resources you can use to check over your resume for grammatical mistakes. Resume Service: This is a resume service you can use to improve the quality of your web designer resume. Boomessays and EssayRoo: These are online proofreading tools, suggested by Revieweal, you can use to make sure you resume is polished and free of errors. My Writing Way and Academadvisor: Check out these career writing blogs for tips and ideas on how to improve your resume. You’ll find posts here by people who have written web designer resumes before. OXEssays and UKWritings: These are editing tools, recommended by UKWritings review, you can use to go over your resume for typos and other errors. StateofWriting and SimpleGrad: Check out these writing guides for suggestions on how to improve your resume. Even experienced writers can benefit from some extra guidance now and then. ResumeLab: Learn what to include in a cover letter. The job market for web designers is competitive. Make sure you lead with your best qualities and skills, and be sure they fit the job description as closely as possible. Be creative, but ensure you keep your resume professional as well. Now go have fun using this guide to write a creative and attention-grabbing web design resume. Author bio Grace Carter is a resume proofreader at Assignment Writing Service and at Australian Help, where she helps with CV editing and cover letter proofreading. Also, Grace teaches business writing at Academized educational website.   Is your web design responsive? “Be objective, fight for the user, and test with real users on the go!” – Interview with design purist, Will Grant Tips and tricks to optimize your responsive web design  

Two of the most talked-about and on-trend roles in tech dominated our Skill Up survey – DevOps engineers and Full-Stack developers. Even before we started exploring our data, we knew that both would feature heavily. Given the amount of time spent online arguing about DevOps and the merits and drawbacks of full-stack development, it’s interesting to see exactly what it means to be a DevOps engineer or full-stack developer. From salary to tool use, both our Web Development and SysAdmin and Security Salary and Skills Reports offer an insight into the professional lives of people actually performing these roles every day. The similarities between DevOps engineering and full-stack development The similarities between the two roles are striking. Both DevOps engineering and full-stack development are having a considerable impact on the way in which technology is used and understood within organizations and businesses – which makes them particularly valuable. In SMEs, for example, DevOps engineers command almost the same amount of money as in Enterprise. Considering the current economic climate, it’s a clear signal of the value of DevOps practices in environments where flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing demands and expectations are crucial to growth. Full-stack developers also command the highest salaries in many industries. In consultancy, for example, full-stack developers earn significantly more than any other web development role. While this could suggest that organizations aren’t yet willing to invest in (or simply don’t need) in-house full-stack developers, it highlights that they are nevertheless willing to spend money on individuals with full-stack knowledge, who are capable of delivering cutting-edge insight. However, just as we saw Cloud consultancies dominate the tech consultancy market a few years ago, over time it’s likely that full-stack development will become more and more established as a standard. DevOps engineers and full-stack developers share the same philosophical germ. They are symptoms of a growing business demand for greater agility and flexibility, and hint at a trend towards greater generalization in the skillset of technical professionals. part of the thrill of #devops to me is how there's no true agreement about what it is. it's like watching LOST all over again — jon devops hendren (@devops) May 18, 2015 Full-stack developers are using DevOps tools I’ve always seen them as manifestations of similar ideas in different technical areas. However, when you look at the data we’ve collected in our survey, alongside some wider research, the relationship between the DevOps engineer and the Full-Stack developer might possibly be more than purely conceptual. ‘Full-Stack’ and ‘DevOps’ are both terms that blur the lines between developer and engineer, and both are two sides of an intriguing form of cross-pollination; technologies more commonly used for deployment and automation. Docker and Vagrant were the most notable, highlighting the impact of containerization and virtualization on web development, but we also found a number of references to the Microsoft automation tool PowerShell – a distinctly DevOps-esque tool if ever there was one. Perhaps there’s a danger of overstating my point – surely we shouldn’t be surprised if web developers are using these tools – it’s not that strange, right? Maybe, but the fact that tools such as these are being used by web developers in their day-to-day work suggests that they are no longer simply expected to develop: they also need to deploy and configure their projects. Indeed, it’s worth noting that across all our web development respondents, a large number plan on learning Docker over the next 12 months. DevOps engineers use a huge range of tools DevOps Engineers were even more eclectic in their tool-usage than full-stack developers. Python is the language of-choice and Puppet the go-to configuration management tool, but web tools such as JavaScript and PHP are also being used. References to Flask, for example, the Python microframework, emphasise the way in which DevOps Engineers have an eye on web development while they’re automating your infrastructure. Taken alone, these responses might not fully evidence the relationship between DevOps engineers and Full-Stack developers. However, there are jobs out there asking for a combination of both skillsets. One, posted by a recruiter working for a nameless ‘creative media house’ in London, was looking for someone to become ‘a key member of multi-party cloud research projects, helping to bring a microservices-based video automation system to life, integrate development and developed systems into onside and global infrastructure’. The tools being asked for were very varied indeed. From a high-level language, such as JavaScript, to scripting languages such as Bash, Python and Perl, to continuous integration tools, configuration management tools and containerization technologies, whoever eventually gets the job certainly deserves to be called a polyglot. Blurring the line between full-stack and DevOps A further indication of the blurred line between engineers and developers can be found in this article from computing.co.uk. It’s an interesting tale of how working practices develop according to necessity and how methodologies and ideas interact with the practical details of a given situation. It tells the story of how the Washington Post went about building its submission platform, and how the way in which the project was resourced and managed changed according to certain pressures – internal and external. The title might actually be misleading – if you read it, it’s not so much that DevOps necessitates full-stack development, more that each thing grows out of the next. It might even be said that the reverse is true – that full-stack development necessitates DevOps thinking. The relationship between DevOps and full-stack development gives a real indication of the state of the tech world in 2015. Within a tech landscape of increasing complexity and cross-pollination there are going to be opportunities for developers and engineers to significantly drive their value as technical professionals. It’s simply a question of learning more, and of being open to new challenges and ideas about how to work effectively. It probably won’t be easy, but it might just be a fun journey.

Earlier this year, Google and Mozilla released a version of Chrome and Firefox that has full support for WebGL 2.0. While some of the previous versions of their browsers also have support for WebGL 2.0, those versions by default disable the WebGL 2.0 feature. By enabling WebGL 2.0 in their latest browser version, it seems both Google and Mozilla are confident that this bleeding edge web technology can finally be used by most users without any problems.  So, what is WebGL 2.0? How does it differ from the previous version of WebGL? What, in fact, is WebGL?  To answer those questions, let's go back in time a little bit. In the early 1990s, graphics intensive applications were expensive to create because the software had to be customized for each type of graphic processing hardware. Imagine having to write an app for each smartphone vendor separately; it would cost many man hours. So, to mitigate this problem, a standard for graphics computing was introduced. This standard is called OpenGL (which stands for Open Graphics Library).  When mobile phones with display screens were introduced, people realized that mobile technology also needed a standard for graphics computing. However, OpenGL is a standard primarily for desktop-class hardware, so they realized that they would need a different standard that could work with the limited capability of mobile hardware. And thus OpenGL ES (Embedded System) was branched out from OpenGL, and the initial version was released in the early 2000s.  The same progression happened to web technology. In 2009, web applications became increasingly graphic-intensive, so a graphical standard called WebGL was introduced to help software developers. One thing noted, however, was that users could access web applications from both desktop and mobile devices, so WebGL needed to work on both platforms. To accommodate that, WebGL was created based on the OpenGL ES specification instead of the desktop-focused OpenGL.  Technology keeps advancing. As graphics hardware becomes more capable, additional features get added to the graphical standards. The latest version of OpenGL ES, version 3.0, was released in 2012 to keep up with the advancement in mobile GPU. WebGL 1.0, however, was still based on OpenGL ES 2.0. So in 2017, the specification for WebGL 2.0, which was based on OpenGL ES 3.0, was finally released.  As we can see from the timeline, WebGL 2.0 is really fresh out the oven. In fact, it's so new, that at the time of writing this article, the only browsers that support the standards are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and the Opera browser. WebGL 2.0 support on Safari is still under development. Also, it's worth noting that no mobile browser supports WebGL 2.0 by default (WebGL 2.0 support on Chrome for Android can be enabled via a hidden menu).  Considering the limited number of compatible platforms, as developers, we really can't rely on the user to have the necessary browser for our apps. So, with that limitation in mind, we have to always check for the browser's capability and prepare a fallback method in the event that the browser does not support WebGL 2.0.  So, how does WebGL version 2.0 differ from version 1.0? Fortunately, nothing major has changed with the way the library is used. This latest version of WebGL simply adds additional features and also makes some optional extensions of the library to be included by default.  One of the WebGL 1.0 extensions that have been made mandatory on WebGL 2.0 is the Instancing extension, which enables developers to render multiple copies of the same mesh efficiently. This feature is very useful for drawing decorative objects, like grass. Another extension that has been included in WebGL 2.0 is Depth Texture, which is used a lot for computing lighting and creating shadow maps.  Another major addition to WebGL 2.0 is the support for GLSL 3.0 ES, the latest programming language for the OpenGL shader. With this version of GLSL, a loop in the shader is no longer restricted to a constant integer. Not just that, GLSL 3.0 ES also brings additional matrix operations (like an inverse function) that will make coding a shader much easier.  WebGL 2.0 also offers much better support for textures. With version 2.0, the non-power of 2D textures are finally supported, which means the size of your texture image is no longer limited to 32, 64, 128, 256, and such. 3D textures are also supported now, which is pretty useful for volumetric effects such as light rays and smoke, as well as for storing medical scans.  WebGL 2.0 also adds support for more texture formats such as RGBA32, RGBA16, R11F_G11F_B10F, SRGB8, and others. More compressed texture formats that are not platform-specific are also supported, including: COMPRESSED_RGB8_ETC2, COMPRESSED_RGBA8_ETC2_EAC, and more.  There are other additions to WebGL 2.0, such as Multiple Draw Buffer, Transform Feedback, Uniform Buffer Object, and more. To learn about these and much more, see the official WebGL 2.0 specifications to check out all those additions in detail.  About this author Raka Mahesa is a game developer at Chocoarts: http://chocoarts.com/, who is interested in digital technology in general. Outside of work hours, he likes to work on his own projects, with Corridoom VR being his latest released game. Raka also regularly tweets as @legacy99. 

A colleague of mine, wrote an article over two years ago, talking about the two top Python web frameworks, Django and Flask. It’s 2018 now, and a lot has changed in the IT world. There have been a couple of frameworks that emerged or gained popularity in the last 3 years, like Bottle or CherryPy, for example. However, Django and Flask have managed to stand their ground and have continued to remain as the top 2 Python frameworks. Moreover, there have been some major breakthroughs in web application architecture like the rise of Microservices, that has in turn pushed the growth of newer architectures like Serverless and Cloud-Native. I thought it would be a good idea to present a more modern comparison of these two frameworks, to help you take an informed decision on which one you should be choosing for your application development. So before we dive into ripping these frameworks apart, let’s briefly go over a few factors we’ll be considering while evaluating them. Here’s what I got in mind, in no particular order: Ease of use Popularity Community support Job market Performance Modern Architecture support Ease of use This is something l like to cover first, because I know it’s really important for developers who are just starting out, to assess the learning curve before they attempt to scale it. When I’m talking about ease of use, I’m talking about how easy it is to get started with using the tool in your day to day projects. Flask, like it’s webpage, is a very simple tool to learn, simply because it’s built to be simple. Moreover, the framework is un-opinionated, meaning that it will allow you to implement things the way you choose to, without throwing a fuss. This is really important when you’re starting out. You don’t want to run into too much issues that will break your confidence as a developer. On the other hand, Django is a great framework to learn too. While several Python developers will disagree with me, I would say Django is a pretty complex framework, especially for a newbie. Now this is not all that bad, right. I mean, especially when you’re building a large project, you want to be the one holding the reins. If you’re starting out with some basic projects then, it may be wise not to choose Django. The way I see it, learning Flask first will allow you to learn Django much faster. Popularity Both frameworks are quite popular, with Django starring at 34k on Github, and Flask having a slight edge at 36k. If you take a look at the Google trends, both tools follow a pretty similar trend, with Django’s volume much higher, owing to its longer existence. Source: SEM Rush As mentioned before, Flask is more popular among beginners and those who want to build basic websites easily. On the other hand, Django is more popular among the professionals who have years of experience building robust websites. Community Support and Documentation In terms of community support, we’re looking at how involved the community is, in developing the tool and providing support to those who need it. This is quite important for someone who’s starting out with a tool, or for that matter, when there’s a new version releasing and you need to keep yourself up to date.. Django features 170k tags on Stackoverflow, which is over 7 times that of Flask, which stands at 21k. Although Django is a clear winner in terms of numbers, both mailing lists are quite active and you can receive all the help you need, quite easily. When it comes to documentation, Django has some solid documentation that can help you get up and running in no time. On the other hand, Flask has good documentation too, but you usually have to do some digging to find what you’re looking for. Job Scenes Jobs are really important especially if you’re looking for a corporate one It’s quite natural that the organization that’s hiring you will already be working with a particular stack and they will expect you to have those skills before you step in. Django records around 2k jobs on Indeed in the USA, while Flask records exactly half that amount. A couple of years ago, the situation was pretty much the same; Django was a prime requirement, while Flask had just started gaining popularity. You’ll find a comment stating that “Picking up Flask might be a tad easier then Django, but for Django you will have more job openings” Itjobswatch.uk lists Django as the 2nd most needed Skill for a Python Developer, whereas Flask is way down at 20. Source: itjobswatch.uk Clearly Django is in more demand that Flask. However, if you are an independent developer, you’re still free to choose the framework you wish to work with. Performance Honestly speaking, Flask is a microframework, which means it delivers a much better performance in terms of speed. This is also because in Flask, you could write 10k lines of code, for something that would take 24k lines in Django. Response time comparison for data from remote server: Django vs Flask In the above image we see how both tools perform in terms of loading a response from the server and then returning it. Both tools are pretty much the same, but Flask has a slight edge over Django. Load time comparison from database with ORM: Django vs Flask In this image, we see how the gap between the tools is quite large, with Flask being much more efficient in loading data from the database. When we talk about performance, we also need to consider the power each framework provides you when you want to build large apps. Django is a clear winner here, as it allows you to build massive, enterprise grade applications. Django serves as a full-stack framework, which can easily be integrated with JavaScript to build great applications. On the other hand, Flask is not suitable for large applications. The JetBrains Python Developer Survey revealed that Django was a more preferred option among the respondents. Jetbrains Python Developer Survey 2017 Modern Architecture Support The monolith has been broken and microservices have risen. What’s interesting is that although applications are huge, they’re now composed of smaller services working together to make up the actual application. While you would think Django would be a great framework to build microservices, it turns out that Flask serves much better, thanks to its lightweight architecture and simplicity. While you work on a huge enterprise application, you might find Flask being interwoven wherever a light framework works best. Here’s the story of one company that ditched Django for microservices. I’m not going to score these tools because they’re both awesome in their own right. The difference arises when you need to choose one for your projects and it’s quite evident that Flask should be your choice when you’re working on a small project or maybe a smaller application built into a larger one, maybe a blog or a small website or a web service. Although, if you’re on the A team, making a super awesome website for maybe, Facebook or a billion dollar enterprise, instead of going the Django unchained route, choose Django with a hint of Flask added in, for all the right reasons. :) Django recently hit version 2.0 last year, while Flask hit version 1.0 last month. Here’s some great resources to get you up and running with Django and Flask. So what are you waiting for? Go build that website! Why functional programming in Python matters Should you move to Python 3.7 Why is Python so good for AI and Machine Learning?

What is React.js? React.js is one of the most talked about JavaScript web frameworks in years. Alongside Angular, and more recently Vue, React is a critical tool that has had a big impact on the way we build web applications. But it's hard to find a better description of React.js than the single sentence on the project's home page: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It's a library. For building user interfaces. This is perfect because, more often than not, this is all we want. The best part about this description is that it highlights React's simplicity. It's not a mega framework. It's not a full-stack solution that's going to handle everything from the database to real-time updates over web socket connections. We don't actually want most of these pre-packaged solutions, because in the end, they usually cause more problems than they solve. Facebook sure did listen to what we want. This is an extract from React and React Native by Adam Boduch. Learn more here. React.js is just the view. That's it. React.js is generally thought of as the view layer in an application. You might have used library like Handlebars, or jQuery in the past. Just as jQuery manipulates UI elements, or Handlebars templates are inserted onto the page, React components change what the user sees. The following diagram illustrates where React fits in our frontend code. This is literally all there is to React. We want to render this data to the UI, so we pass it to a React component which handles the job of getting the HTML into the page. You might be wondering what the big deal is. On the surface, React appears to be another rendering technology. But it's much more than that. It can make application development incredibly simple. That's why it's become so popular. React.js is simple React doesn't have many moving parts for us to learn about and understand. The advantage to having a small API to work with is that you can spend more time familiarizing yourself with it, experimenting with it, and so on. The opposite is true of large frameworks, where all your time is devoted to figuring out how everything works. The following diagram gives a rough idea of the APIs that we have to think about when programming with React. React is divided into two major APIs. First, there's the React DOM. This is the API that's used to perform the actual rendering on a web page. Second, there's the React component API. These are the parts of the page that are actually rendered by React DOM. Within a React component, we have the following areas to think about: Data: This is data that comes from somewhere (the component doesn't care where), and is rendered by the component. Lifecycle: These are methods that we implement that respond to changes in the lifecycle of the component. For example, the component is about to be rendered. Events: This is code that we write for responding to user interactions. JSX: This is the syntax of React components used to describe UI structures. Don't fixate on what these different areas of the React API represent just yet. The takeaway here is that React is simple. Just look at how little there is to figure out! This means that we don't have to spend a ton of time going through API details here. Instead, once you pick up on the basics, you can spend more time on nuanced React usage patterns. React has a declarative UI structure React newcomers have a hard time coming to grips with the idea that components mix markup in with their JavaScript. If you've looked at React examples and had the same adverse reaction, don't worry. Initially, we're all skeptical of this approach, and I think the reason is that we've been conditioned for decades by the separation of concerns principle. Now, whenever we see things mixed together, we automatically assume that this is bad and shouldn't happen. The syntax used by React components is called JSX (JavaScript XML). The idea is actually quite simple. A component renders content by returning some JSX. The JSX itself is usually HTML markup, mixed with custom tags for the React components. What's absolutely groundbreaking here is that we don't have to perform little micro-operations to change the content of a component. For example, think about using something like jQuery to build your application. You have a page with some content on it, and you want to add a class to a paragraph when a button is clicked. Performing these steps is easy enough, but the challenge is that there are steps to perform at all. This is called imperative programming, and it's problematic for UI development. While this example of changing the class of an element in response to an event is simple, real applications tend to involve more than 3 or 4 steps to make something happen. Read more: 5 reasons to learn React React components don't require executing steps in an imperative way to render content. This is why JSX is so central to React components. The XML-style syntax makes it easy to describe what the UI should look like. That is, what are the HTML elements that this component is going to render? This is called declarative programming, and is very well-suited for UI development. Time and data Another area that's difficult for React newcomers to grasp is the idea that JSX is like a static string, representing a chunk of rendered output. Are we just supposed to keep rendering this same view? This is where time and data come into play. React components rely on data being passed into them. This data represents the dynamic aspects of the UI. For example, a UI element that's rendered based on a Boolean value could change the next time the component is rendered. Here's an illustration of the idea. Each time the React component is rendered, it's like taking a snapshot of the JSX at that exact moment in time. As our application moves forward through time, we have an ordered collection of rendered user interface components. In addition to declaratively describing what a UI should be, re-rendering the same JSX content makes things much easier for developers. The challenge is making sure that React can handle the performance demands of this approach. Performance matters with React Using React to build user interfaces means that we can declare the structure of the UI with JSX. This is less error-prone than the imperative approach to assembling the UI piece by piece. However, the declarative approach does present us with one challenge—performance. For example, having a declarative UI structure is fine for the initial rendering, because there's nothing on the page yet. So the React renderer can look at the structure declared in JSX, and render it into the browser DOM. This is illustrated below. On the initial render, React components and their JSX are no different from other template libraries. For instance, Handlebars will render a template to HTML markup as a string, which is then inserted into the browser DOM. Where React is different from libraries like Handlebars is when data changes, and we need to re-render the component. Handlebars will just rebuild the entire HTML string, the same way it did on the initial render. Since this is problematic for performance, we often end up implementing imperative workarounds that manually update tiny bits of the DOM. What we end up with is a tangled mess of declarative templates, and imperative code to handle the dynamic aspects of the UI. We don't do this in React. This is what sets React apart from other view libraries. Components are declarative for the initial render, and they stay this way even as they're re-rendered. It's what React does under the hood that makes re-rendering declarative UI structures possible. React has something called the virtual DOM, which is used to keep a representation of the real DOM elements in memory. It does this so that each time we re-render a component, it can compare the new content, to the content that's already displayed on the page. Based on the difference, the virtual DOM can execute the imperative steps necessary to make the changes. So not only do we get to keep our declarative code when we need to update the UI, React will also make sure that it's done in a performant way. Here's what this process looks like: When you read about React, you'll often see words like diffing and patching. Diffing means comparing old content with new content to figure out what's changed. Patching means executing the necessary DOM operations to render the new content React.js has the right level of abstraction React.js doesn't have a great deal of abstraction, but the abstractions the framework does implement are crucial to its success. In the preceding section, you saw how JSX syntax translates to the low-level operations that we have no interest in maintaining. The more important way to look at how React translates our declarative UI components is the fact that we don't necessarily care what the render target is. The render target happens to be the browser DOM with React. But this is changing. We're only just starting to see this with React Native, but the possibilities are endless. I personally will not be surprised when React Toast becomes a thing, targeting toasters that can singe the rendered output of JSX on to bread. The abstraction level with React is at the right level, and it's in the right place. The following diagram gives you an idea of how React can target more than just the browser. From left to right, we have React Web (just plain React), React Native, React Desktop, and React Toast. As you can see, to target something new, the same pattern applies: Implement components specific to the target Implement a React renderer that can perform the platform-specific operations under the hood Profit This is obviously an oversimplification of what's actually implemented for any given React environment. But the details aren't so important to us. What's important is that we can use our React knowledge to focus on describing the structure of our user interface on any platform. Disclaimer: React Toast will probably never be a thing, unfortunately.

Developer advocates are people with a strong technical background, whose job is to help developers be successful with a platform or technology. They act as a bridge between the engineering team and the developer community. A developer advocate does not only fill in the gap between developers and the platform but also looks after the development of developers in terms of traction and progress on their projects. Developer advocacy, is broadly referred to as "developer relations". Those who practice developer advocacy have fallen into in this profession in one way or another. As the processes and theories in the world of programming have evolved over several years, so has the idea of developer advocacy. This is the result of developer advocates who work in the wild using their own initiatives. This article is an excerpt from the book Developer, Advocate! by Geertjan Wielenga. This book serves as a rallying cry to inspire and motivate tech enthusiasts and burgeoning developer advocates to take their first steps within the tech community. The question then arises, how does one become a developer advocate? Here are some experiences shared by some well-known developer advocates on how they started the journey that landed them to this role. Is developer advocacy taught in universities? Bruno Borges, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft says, for most developer advocates or developer relations personnel, it was something that just happened. Developer advocacy is not a discipline that is taught in universities; there's no training specifically for this. Most often, somebody will come to realize that what they already do is developer relations. This is a discipline that is a conjunction of several other roles: software engineering, product management, and marketing. I started as a software engineer and then I became a product manager. As a product manager, I was engaged with marketing divisions and sales divisions directly on a weekly basis. Maybe in some companies, sales, marketing, and product management are pillars that are not needed. I think it might vary. But in my opinion, those pillars are essential for doing a proper developer relations job. Trying to aim for those pillars is a great foundation. Just as in computer science when we go to college for four years, sometimes we don't use some of that background, but it gives us a good foundation. From outsourcing companies that just built business software for companies, I then went to vendor companies. That's where I landed as a person helping users to take full advantage of the software that they needed to build their own solutions. That process is, ideally, what I see happening to others. The journey of a regular tech enthusiast to a developer advocate Ivar Grimstad, a developer advocate at Eclipse foundation, speaks about his journey from being a regular tech enthusiast attending conferences to being there speaking at conferences as an advocate for his company. Ivar Grimstad says, I have attended many different conferences in my professional life and I always really enjoyed going to them. After some years of regularly attending conferences, I came to the point of thinking, "That guy isn't saying anything that I couldn't say. Why am I not up there?" I just wanted to try speaking, so I started submitting abstracts. I already gave talks at meetups locally, but I began feeling comfortable enough to approach conferences. I continued submitting abstracts until I got accepted. As it turned out, while I was becoming interested in speaking, my company was struggling to raise its profile. Nobody, even in Sweden, knew what we did. So, my company was super happy for any publicity it could get. I could provide it with that by just going out and talking about tech. It didn't have to be related to anything we did; I just had to be there with the company name on the slides. That was good enough in the eyes of my company. After a while, about 50% of my time became dedicated to activities such as speaking at conferences and contributing to open source projects. Tables turned from being an engineer to becoming a developer advocate Mark Heckler, a Spring developer and advocate at Pivotal, narrates his experience about how tables turned for him from University to Pivotal Principal Technologist & Developer Advocate. He says, initially, I was doing full-time engineering work and then presenting on the side. I was occasionally taking a few days here and there to travel to present at events and conferences. I think many people realized that I had this public-facing level of activities that I was doing. I was out there enough that they felt I was either doing this full-time or maybe should be. A good friend of mine reached out and said, "I know you're doing this anyway, so how would you like to make this your official role?" That sounded pretty great, so I interviewed, and I was offered a full-time gig doing, essentially, what I was already doing in my spare time. A hobby turned out to be a profession Matt Raible, a developer advocate at Okta has worked as an independent consultant for 20 years. He did advocacy as a side hobby. He talks about his experience as a consultant and walks through the progress and development. I started a blog in 2002 and wrote about Java a lot. This was before Stack Overflow, so I used Struts and Java EE. I posted my questions, which you would now post on Stack Overflow, on that blog with stack traces, and people would find them and help. It was a collaborative community. I've always done the speaking at conferences on the side. I started working for Stormpath two years ago, as a contractor part-time, and I was working at Computer Associates at the same time. I was doing Java in the morning at Stormpath and I was doing JavaScript in the afternoon at Computer Associates. I really liked the people I was working with at Stormpath and they tried to hire me full-time. I told them to make me an offer that I couldn't refuse, and they said, "We don't know what that is!" I wanted to be able to blog and speak at conferences, so I spent a month coming up with my dream job. Stormpath wanted me to be its Java lead. The problem was that I like Java, but it's not my favorite thing. I tend to do more UI work. The opportunity went away for a month and then I said, "There's a way to make this work! Can I do Java and JavaScript?" Stormpath agreed that instead of being more of a technical leader and owning the Java SDK, I could be one of its advocates. There were a few other people on board in the advocacy team. Six months later, Stormpath got bought out by Okta. As an independent consultant, I was used to switching jobs every six months, but I didn't expect that to happen once I went full-time. That's how I ended up at Okta! Developer advocacy can be done by calculating the highs and lows of the tech world Scott Davis, a Principal Engineer at Thoughtworks, was also a classroom instructor, teaching software classes to business professionals before becoming a developer advocate. As per him, tech really is a world of strengths and weaknesses. Advocacy, I think, is where you honestly say, "If we balance out the pluses and the minuses, I'm going to send you down the path where there are more strengths than weaknesses. But I also want to make sure that you are aware of the sharp, pointy edges that might nick you along the way." I spent eight years in the classroom as a software instructor and that has really informed my entire career. It's one thing to sit down and kind of understand how something works when you're cowboy coding on your own. It's another thing altogether when you're standing up in front of an audience of tens, or hundreds, or thousands of people. Discover how developer advocates are putting developer interests at the heart of the software industry in companies including Microsoft and Google with Developer, Advocate! by Geertjan Wielenga. This book is a collection of in-depth conversations with leading developer advocates that reveal the world of developer relations today. 6 reasons why employers should pay for their developers’ training and learning resources “Developers need to say no” – Elliot Alderson on the FaceApp controversy in a BONUS podcast episode [Podcast] GitHub has blocked an Iranian software developer’s account How do AWS developers manage Web apps? Are you looking at transitioning from being a developer to manager? Here are some leadership roles to consider

If you’re a backend developer, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the range of backend development tools available. It goes without saying that you should use what works for you but sometimes it’s not that easy to even work that out. With this in mind, this year’s Skill Up report offers a useful insight into some of the most popular backend tools being used today. Let’s take a look at what tools came out on top. That should help you make decisions about what you’re going to use or maybe even just learn. Read the Skill Up report in full. Sign up to our weekly newsletter and download the PDF for free. Node.js More than 50% respondents said, they prefer Node.js, the popular server-side Javascript coding framework. Node.js is a Javascript runtime that runs on the V8 JavaScript runtime engine. Node.js adds capabilities to Javascript (front-end language) to let it do more than just creating interactive websites. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. The latest stable release of Node, Node 10, will be the next candidate in line for the Long Term Support (LTS) in October 2018. Node.js 10.0 comes with plenty of new features like OpenSSL 1.1.0 security toolkit, upgraded npm, N-API, and much more. Get started with learning Node.js with the following books: Learning Node.js Development Learn Node.js by Building 6 Projects RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition ASP.NET Core The next popular alternative was ASP. NET Core with over 25% developers approving it as their choice of backend framework. ASP.NET Core is the open-source cross-platform framework for building backends, web apps and services, and IoT apps. According to the skill-up survey, it was also one of the most popular framework used by developers. It provides a cloud-ready, environment-based configuration system. It seamlessly integrates with popular client-side frameworks and libraries, including Angular, React, and Bootstrap. Get started with ASP.NET Core by reading: Learning ASP.NET Core 2.0 Mastering ASP.NET Core 2.0 ASP.NET Core 2 High Performance - Second Edition Express.js Developers and tech pros also like to work with Express JS, and hence it ranked No. 3 on our list. Express JS is the pre-built Node JS framework that can help developers build faster and smarter websites and web apps. Express basically extends Node.js to build complete web apps. It is the perfect framework to learn for developers, who are fluent in Node.js, but want to transition to creating apps from just server-side technologies. Express is lightweight and comes with extra, built-in web application features and the Express API to support the already robust, feature-packed Node.js platform. Express is not just limited to NodeJS. It also works seamlessly with other modules and offers HTTP utilities and middleware for creating APIs. It can help developers master single-page and multiple-page websites, as well as some complex web apps. You can go through Projects in ExpressJS [Video], a complete course to learn professional web development using Express.js. Laravel Next, was Laravel, a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks. It is one of the most popular PHP frameworks and is also free and and open source. It features: A simple, fast routing engine Powerful dependency injection container Multiple back-ends for session and cache storage Database agnostic schema migrations Robust background job processing Real-time event broadcasting The latest stable release, Laravel 5 is a substantial upgrade with a lot of new toys, at the same time retaining the features that made Laravel wildly successful. It comes with plenty of architectural as well as design-based changes. Start building with Laravel with these videos. Beginning Laravel [Video] Laravel Foundations: Basics to Every App [Video] Java EE The fifth most popular choice of backend tool is the Java EE. The Enterprise Java standard or Java EE is a collection of technologies and APIs for the Java platform designed to support Enterprise. By enterprise, we mean applications classified as large-scale, distributed, transactional and highly-available, designed to support mission-critical business requirements. Applications written to comply with the Java EE specification do not tie developers to a specific vendor; instead, they can be deployed to any Java EE compliant application server. The Java EE server application implements the Java EE platform APIs and provides the standard Java EE services. The latest stable release, Java EE 8 brings with it a load of features, mainly targeting newer architectures such as microservices, modernized security APIs, and cloud deployments. Our best picks for learning Java EE: Java EE 8 Application Development Architecting Modern Java EE Applications Java EE 8 High Performance The other backend tools which were among the top picks by developers included: Spring, a programming and configuration model for building modern Java-based enterprise applications, on any kind of deployment platform. Django, a powerful Python web framework for creating RESTful web services. It reduces the amount of trivial code, which simplifies the creation of web applications and results in faster development. Flask, a framework for building web servers in Python. It is a micro framework, meaning it’s not a full stack web application development framework. It just gives the developers very basics to get a web server running. Firebase, Google’s mobile platform to help developers run mobile backend code without managing servers and develop high-quality apps. Ruby on Rails, one of the oldest, backend technology. A certain percentage of people still prefer using ruby on rails for their backend code. Rails is a flexible and IDE friendly framework with easy functions and manipulations and the support of the powerful ruby language. The entire skill up survey report can be read on the Packt website, which details on what developers think about the changing tech landscape and the parameters that are driving that change. This survey report is launched at the start of the Skill Up campaign, where every eBook and video will be available for $10. Go grab your free content now!

Static sites are back and stronger than ever. A large number of businesses have realized the importance of sticking to trendy, beautiful, static websites which have less hassle of server maintenance and security exploits. For example, Nest and MailChimp, prominent design companies, are using static site generators for their primary websites. Vox Media has built an entire publishing system around Middleman static site generator. A static website contains Web pages coded in HTML, with fixed content, so they look same to every user. These websites are made using static site generators, which automate the process of creating websites, with minimal coding required from developers. If you’re looking to implement static sites in your next business project, we have compiled a list of the top 5 static site generators to help you design interactive and fast websites. Before we dive in, first let’s understand when choosing static sites makes sense. Why choose static sites? Static sites typically take the content stored in flat files as opposed to dynamic sites where databases serve as content stores. This content is applied against templates and is used to generate a structure of static HTML files. These static files function as the website for the users. Agreed, they lack real-time content and have limited functionalities. But these static sites come in real handy when you want to avoid the hassle of server maintenance while also keeping your pocket light. Not to mention, they are the best option available when your product doesn’t require timely upgrades. Another important factor which contributes to their popularity is the ability to be indexed easily by Google search engines. Since Google has indicated site speed to be one of the signals used to rank pages, static sites have truly shined through. With pure HTML static websites, you have total control over your SEO, and the HTML and CSS are fully understood by search engines. Unlike dynamic websites, you don’t need a special plugin to manage your SEO or need to optimize page load time. Static sites are fast loading, secure, and most importantly, well prepared for traffic surges. This is why their popularity is only surging with the growth of publishing content online. Now that I have ignited your interest to make your next website static, let’s look at some frameworks for building these sites. Static site generators have exploded in popularity in recent years, with a total of more than 100,000 stars for static website generator repositories. Hence, navigating the wide range of choices can be difficult. Here are my top five picks to get you started. Jekyll: The most mature player Jekyll is perhaps the most mature and popular static site generator (Quite obvious from the Github stars). It is built with Ruby and is typically used for transforming plain texts into static websites and blogs. It takes a directory filled with text files, renders that content with Markdown and Liquid templates, and generates a publish-ready static website. Jekyll comes with a big bonus of being natively supported by GitHub pages. So you can easily deploy your site using GitHub for absolutely free. It also has a huge community and wide array of plugins, making it easier for Wordpress and Drupal developers to import content. Hugo: The fastest player Blazingly fast, Hugo is a static HTML and CSS website generator built around Google’s Go programming language. It is optimized for speed, ease of use, and configurability. As with Jekyll, Hugo takes a directory of text files and templates, albeit written in Go, and generates them into a full HTML website. It is extremely fast with build times less than 1 ms per page It is cross-platform, with easy installation on macOS, Linux, Windows, and more. It renders changes on the fly with LiveReload as you develop. It provides full i18n support for multi-language sites. Hexo: The One-command player Hexo is a powerful framework built with Node.js. It offers super fast rendering even for extremely large sites. Hexo is highly extensible as it offers support for GitHub flavored Markdown and most Octopress plugins. It has a One-command deployment to GitHub Pages, Heroku, and other sites. Hexo also features a powerful plugin system. You can install more plugins for Jade, CoffeeScript plugins and many Jekyll plugins with minor adjustments. Gatsby: The multi-tasker Gatsby is a static site generator for React. It is optimized for speed as it loads only critical parts for fast loading. Once loaded, Gatsby prefetches resources for other pages so that clicking around the site feels incredibly fast. Gatsby.js can also be used to generate static Progressive Web apps. It does automatic routing based on the directory structure. The HTML code is generated server-side and additional code need not be included for configuring the router. Gatsby has a pre-configured Webpack-based build system and allows easy data integration from CMSs, SaaS services, APIs, databases, and file systems. VuePress: The new player VuePress, the new player in town, is a minimalistic static site generator powered by Vue.js. VuePress creates a single-page application with pre-rendered static HTML from a Markdown file. This markdown file is powered by Vue, VueRouter, and Webpack. It is composed of two parts: A theming system A default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. This default theme has a header-based search, customizable navbar and sidebar, optional homepage, auto-generated Github link and Page edit links. VuePress also comes with integrated Google Analytics and multi-language support. Here's a short table summarising all static site generators. Static Site Generator GitHub stars Languages Templates Features Jekyll 34k + Ruby Liquid - Most mature and popular - Supported by GitHub pages - A wide array of Plugins Hugo 25k + Go Go - Extremely fast - Cross-platform - Renders changes on the fly - Full i18n support for multi-language sites. Hexo 22k + Javascript EJS, Pug - Highly extensible - One-command deployment - Powerful plugin system Gatsby 21k + Javascript React - Optimized for speed - Generates static PWA - A pre-configured Webpack-based build system VuePress 7k + (growing fast) Javascript Vue - Theming system - Default theme - Google analytics support - Multi-Language support   Apart from these, you also have Next, GitBook, Nuxt, Pelican, among others as some of the other static site generators to choose from. Before going with your choice of static site generator, you need to first make an informed decision on whether or not a static site is right for your next project. Consider your website needs and the kind of business you’re running. If your website has too much going on, it may be killing your traffic. In such cases having a fast, secure and beautiful static site is much more beneficial than a massive, unwieldy dynamic website. Firefox 60 arrives with exciting updates for web developers: Quantum CSS engine, new Web APIs and more [news] Get ready for Bootstrap v4.1; Web developers to strap up their boots [news] How to create a generic reusable section for a single page based website [tutorial]

The profession of a back end web developer is ringing out loud and companies seek to get a qualified server-side developer to their team. The fact that the back-end specialist has comprehensive set of knowledge and skills helps them realize their potential in versatile web development projects. Before diving into what it takes to succeed at back end development as a profession, let’s look at what it’s about. In simple words, the back end is that invisible part of any application that activates all its internal elements. If the front-end answers the question of “how does it look”, then the back end or server-side web development deals with “how does it work”. A back end developer is the one who deals with the administrative part of the web application, the internal content of the system, and server-side technologies such as database, architecture and software logic. If you intend to become a professional server-side developer then there are few basic steps which will ease out your journey. In this article we have listed down five aspects of server-side development: servers, databases, networks, queues and frameworks, which you must master to become a successful server side web developer. Servers and databases: At the heart of server-side development are servers which are nothing but the hardware and storage devices connected to a local computer with working internet connection. So everytime you ask your browser to load a web page, the data stored in the servers are accessed and sent to the browser in a certain format. The bigger the application, the larger the amount of data stored in the server-side. The larger the data, the higher possibility of lag and slow performance. Databases are the particular file formats in which the data is stored. There are two different types of databases - Relational and Non- Relational. Both have their own pros and cons. Some of the popular databases which you can learn to take your skills up to the next level are NoSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB etc. Static and Dynamic servers: Static servers are physical hard drives where application data, CSS and HTML files, pictures and images are stored. Dynamic servers actually signify another layer between the server and the browser. They are often known as application servers. The primary function of these application servers is to process the data and format it as per the web page when the data fetching operation is initiated from the browser. This makes saving data much easier and process of data loading becomes much faster. For example, Wikipedia servers are filled with huge amounts of data, but they are not stored as HTML pages, rather they are stored as raw data. When they are queried by the browser, the application browser processes the data and formats it into the HTML format and then sends it to the browser. This makes the process a whole lot faster and space saving for the physical data storage. If you want to go a step ahead and think futuristic, then the latest trend is moving your servers on the cloud. This means the server-side tasks are performed by different cloud based services like Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure. This makes your task much simpler as a back end developer, since you simply need to decide which services you would require to best run your application and the rest is taken care off by the cloud service providers. Another aspect of server side development that’s generating a lot of interest among developer is is serverless development. This is based on the concept that the cloud service providers will allocate server space depending on your need and you don’t have to take care of backend resources and requirements. In a way the name Serverless is a misnomer, because the servers are there, just that they are in the cloud and you don’t have to bother about it. The primary role of a backend developer in a serverless system would be to figure out the best possible services and optimize the running cost on the cloud, deploy and monitor the system for non-stop robust performance. The communication protocol: The protocol which defines the data transfer between client side and server side is called HyperTextTransfer Protocol (HTTP). When a search request is typed in the browser, an HTTP request with a URL is sent to the server and the server then sends a response message with either request succeeded or web page not found. When an HTML page is returned for a search query, it is rendered by the web browser. While processing the response, the browser may discover links to other resources (e.g. an HTML page usually references JavaScript and CSS pages), and send separate HTTP Requests to download these files. Both static and dynamic websites use exactly the same communication protocol/patterns. As we have progressed quite a long way from the initial communication protocols, newer technologies like SSL, TLS, IPv6 have taken over the web communication domain. Transport Layer Security (TLS) – and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is now deprecated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – are cryptographic protocols that provide communications security over a computer network. The primary reason these protocols were introduced was to protect user data and provide increased security. Similarly newer protocols had to be introduced around late 90’s to cater to the increasing number of internet users. Protocols are basically unique identification pointers that determine the IP address of the server. The initial protocol used was IPv4 which is currently being substituted by IPv6 which has the capability to provide 2^128 or 3.4×1038 addresses. Message Queuing: This is one of the most important aspects of creating fast and dynamic web applications. Message Queuing is the stage where data is queued as per the different responses and then delivered to the browser. This process is asynchronous which means that the server and the browser need not interact with the message queue at the same time. There are some popular message queuing tools like RabbitMQ, MQTT, ActiveMQ which provide real time message queuing functionality. Server-side frameworks and languages: Now comes the last but one of the most important pointers. If you are a developer with a particular choice of language in mind, you can use a language based framework to add functionalities to your application easily. Also this makes it more efficient. Some of the popular server-side frameworks are Node.js for JavaScript, Django for Python, Laravel for PHP, Spring for Java and so on. But using these frameworks will need some amount of experience in respective languages. Now that you have a broad understanding of what server-side web development is, and what are the components, you can jump right into server-side development, databases and protocols management to progress into a successful professional back-end web developer. The best backend tools in web development Preparing the Spring Web Development Environment Is novelty ruining web development?  

REST has long been the go-to web service for front-end developers, but recently GraphQL has exploded in popularity. Now there's another great choice for developers for implementing APIs – the Facebook created, open source GraphQL specification. Facebook has been using GraphQL APIs for almost 6 years now in most components of the Facebook and Instagram apps and websites. And since it’s open source announcement in 2015, a large number of industries, from tech giants to lean startups, have also been using this specification for creating web services. Here are 7 reasons why you should also give GraphQL a try for building your APIs. #1. GraphQL is Protocol agnostic Both REST and GraphQL are specifications for building and consuming APIs and can be operated over HTTP. However, GraphQL is protocol agnostic. What this means is that it does not depend on anything HTTP. We don't use HTTP methods or HTTP response codes with GraphQL, except for using it as a channel for GraphQL communication. #2. GraphQL allows Data Fetching GraphQL APIs allow data fetching. This data fetching feature is what makes it better as compared to REST, as you have only one endpoint to access data on a server. Whereas in a typical REST API, you may have to make requests to multiple endpoints to fetch or retrieve data from a server. #3. GraphQL eliminates Overfetching and Underfetching As mentioned earlier, the GraphQL server is a single endpoint that handles all the client requests, and it can give the clients the power to customize those requests at any time. Clients can ask for multiple resources in the same request and they can customize the fields needed from all of them. This way, clients can be in control of the data they fetch and they can easily avoid the problems of over-fetching and under-fetching. With GraphQL, clients and servers are independent which means they can be changed without affecting each other. #4. Openness, Flexibility, and Power GraphQL APIs solves the data loading problem with its three attributes. First, GraphQL is an open specification rather than a software. You can use GraphQL to serve many different needs at once. Secondly, GraphQL is flexible enough not to be tied to any particular programming language, database or hosting environment. Third GraphQL brings in power and performance and reduces code complexity by using declarative queries instead of writing code. #5. Request and response are directly related In RESTful APIs, the language we use for the request is different than the language we use for the response. However, in the case of GraphQL APIs, the language used for the request is directly related to the language used for the response. Since we use a similar language to communicate between clients and servers, debugging problems become easier. With GraphQL APIs queries mirroring the shape of their response, any deviations can be detected, and these deviations would point us to the exact query fields that are not resolving correctly. #6. GraphQL features declarative data communication GraphQL pays major attention towards improving the DI/DX. The developer experience is as important as the user experience, maybe more. When it comes to data communication, we need to give developers a declarative language for communicating an application's data requirements. GraphQL acts as a simple query language that allows developers to ask for the data required by their applications in a simple, natural, and declarative way that mirrors the way they use that data in their applications. That's why frontend application developers love GraphQL. #7. Open source ecosystem and a fabulous community GraphQL has evolved in leaps and bounds from when it was open sourced. The only tooling available for developers to use GraphQL was the graphql-js reference implementation, when it came out first. Now, reference implementations of the GraphQL specification are available in various languages with multiple GraphQL clients. In addition, you also have multiple tools such as Prisma, GraphQL Faker, GraphQL Playground, graphql-config etc to build GraphQL APIs. The GraphQL community is growing rapidly. Entire conferences are exclusively dedicated to GraphQL, GraphQL Europe, GraphQL Day and GraphQL Summit to name a few. If you want to learn GraphQL, here a few resources to help you get your feet off the ground quickly. Learning GraphQL and Relay Hands-on GraphQL for Better RESTful Web Services [Video] Learning GraphQL with React and Relay [Video] 5 web development tools will matter in 2018 What RESTful APIs can do for Cloud, IoT, social media and other emerging technologies

React.JS is one of the most powerful JavaScript libraries. It empowers the interface of major organisations such as Amazon (an e-commerce giant has recently introduced a programming language of its own), PayPal, BBC, CNN, and over a million other websites worldwide. Created by Facebook, React.JS has quickly built a daunting technical reputation and a loyal fan following. Currently React.js is extensively mentioned in job openings - companies want to hire dedicated react.js developer more than Vue.js engineers. In this post, you’ll find out why React.JS is the right framework to start your remote work, despite the library’s steep learning curve and what are the ways to use it more efficiently. 5 Reasons to learn React.JS Developers might be hesitant to learn React as it’s not a full-fledged framework and a developer needs to handle models and controllers on their own. Nevertheless, there are more than a handful of reasons to become a react js developer. Let’s take a closer look at them: 1. It’s functional There’s no need to use classes in React. The platform relies heavily on functional components, allowing developers not to overcomplicate the codebase. While classes offer developers a handful of convenient features (using life cycle hooks, and such), the benefits provided by the functional syntax are loud and clear: Higher readability. Properties like state functions or lifecycle hooks tend to make reading and testing the code a pain in the neck. Plain JS functions are easier to wrap your head around. A developer can achieve the same functionality with less code. The software engineering team will more likely adhere to best practices. Stateless functional components encourage front-end engineers to separate presentational and container components. It takes more time to adjust to a more complex workflow - in the long run, it pays off in a better code structure. ES6 destructuring helps spot bloated components. A developer can see the list of dependencies bound to every component. As a result, you will be able to break up overly complex structures or rethink them altogether. React.JS is the tool that recognizes the power of functional components to their fullest extent (even the glorified Angular 2 can’t compare). As a result, developers can strive for maximum code eloquence and improved performance. 2. It’s declarative Most likely, you are no stranger to CSS and the SQL database programming language, and, as such, are familiar with declarative programming. Still, to recap, here are the differences between declarative and imperative approaches: Imperative programming uses statements to manipulate the state of the program. Declarative programming is a paradigm that changes the system based on the communication logic. While imperative programming gives developers a possibility to design a control flow step-by-step in statements and may come across as easier, it is declarative programming to have more perks in the long run. Higher readability. Low-level details will not clutter the code as the paradigm is not concerned with them. More freedom for reasoning. Instead of outlining the procedure step-by-step, a  successful React JS developer focuses on describing the solution and its logic. Reusability. You can apply a declarative description to various scenarios - that is times more challenging for a step-by-step construct. Efficient in solving specific domain problems. High performance of declarative programming stems from the fact that it adapts to the domain. For databases, for instance, a developer will create a set of operations to handle data, and so on. Capitalizing on the benefits of declarative programming is React’s strong point. You will be able to create transparent, reusable, and highly readable interfaces. 3. Virtual DOM Developers that manage high-load projects often face DOM-related challenges. Bottlenecks tend to appear even after a small change in the document-object-model. Due to the document object model’s tree structure, there’s a high interconnectivity between DOM components. To facilitate maintenance, Facebook has implemented the virtual DOM in React.JS. It allows developers to ensure the project’s error-free performance before updating an actual DOM tree. Virtual DOM provides extra assurance in the app’s performance - in the long run, it significantly improves user satisfaction rates. 4. Downward data binding As opposed to Angular two-way data binding, React.JS uses the downward structure to ensure the changes in child structures will not affect parents. A developer can only transfer data from a parent to a child, not vice versa. The key components of downward data binding include: Passing the state to the child components as well as the view; The view triggers actions; Actions can update the state; State updates are passed on to the view and the child components. Compared to the two-way data binding, the one implemented by React.JS is not as error-prone (a developer controls data to a larger extent), more comfortable to test and debug due to a clearly defined structure. 5. React Developer Tools React.JS developers get to benefit from a wide toolkit that covers all facets of the application performance. There’s a wide array of debugging and design solutions, including a life-saving React Developer Tools extension for Chrome and Firefox. Using this and other tools, you can define child and parent components, examine their state, observe hierarchies, and inspect props. Advantages of React.js React.JS helps developers systemize the interfaces of their projects by introducing the ‘components’ structure. The library allows the creation of modular views that consist of reusable blocks - pop-ups, tables, etc. One of the most significant advantages of using React.js is the way it improves user experience. A textbook example of library usage on Facebook is the possibility to see the changing number of likes in real-time without reloading the page. Originally, React.JS was released back in 2011 by a Facebook engineer as a way to upscale and maintain the complex interface of the Facebook Ads app. The library’s high functionality resulted in its adoption by other SMEs and large corporations - now React JS is one of the most widely used development tools. How to Use React.JS? Depending on your HTML and JavaScript proficiency, it may take anywhere from a few days to months to get the hang of React. For the basic understanding of the library, take a look at React.JS features as well as the setup process. Getting started with React.JS To start working with React, a developer has to import React and React to DOM libraries using a basic HTML file. Now that you have set up a working space, take your time to examine the defining features of React.JS. Components All React.JS elements are components. Depending on the syntax, they are grouped into the class and functional ones. As, in most cases, both lead to equal outcomes, a React.JS beginner should start by learning functional components. Props Props are the way for React.JS developers to pass data from parent to child structures. Keep in mind that, unlike states, props are immutable under any circumstances. They provide developers with high code reusability as the same message will be displayed on all pages. At times, developers do want components to change themselves. That’s when states come in handy. States States are used when a developer wants the application data to change. The most common operations that have to do with states include: Initialization; Modification; Adding event handlers. These were the basic concepts a React.JS developer has to be familiar with to get the most out of the library. React.JS best practices If you’re already using React.JS, be sure to make the most out of it. Keep track of new trends and best practices in all facets of app management - accessibility, performance, security, and others. Here’s a short collection of React.JS development secret tips that’ll improve the maintenance and development efficiency. Performance: Consider using React.Fragment to avoid extra DOM nodes. To load components on-demand, use React.Lazy, along with React.Suspense. Another popular practice among JS developers is taking advantage of shouldComponentUpdate to avoid unnecessary rendering. Try to keep the JS code as clean as possible. For instance, delete the DOM components you don’t use with ComponentDidUnomunt (). For component caching, use React.Memo. Accessibility Pay attention to the casing and reserved word differences in HTML and React.js to avoid bottlenecks. To set up page titles, use the react-handle plugin to set up page titles. Don’t forget to put ALT-tags for any non-text content. Use ref() functions to pinpoint the focus on a given component. External tools like ESLint plugin help developers monitor accessibility. Debugging Use Chrome Dev Tools - there are dozens of features - reduct logger, error messages handler, and so on. Leave the console open while coding to detect errors faster. To have a better understanding of the code you’re dealing with, adopt a table view for objects. Other quick debugging hacks include marking DOM items to find them quickly in a Google Chrome Inspector. View full stack traces for functions. The bottom line Thanks to a powerful team of engineers at work, React.JS has quickly become a powerhouse for front end development. Its huge reliance on JavaScript makes a library easier to get to know. While React.JS pros and cons are extensive - however, the possibility to express UIs declaratively along with the promotion of functional components makes it a favorite framework for many. A wide variety of the projects it empowers and a large number of job openings prove that knowing React is no longer optional for developers. The good news, there’s no lack of learning tools and resources online. Take your time to explore the library - you’ll be amazed by the order and efficiency React brings to applications. Author Bio Anastasia Stefanuk is a passionate writer and a marketing manager at Mobilunity. The company provides professional staffing services, so she is always aware of technology news and wants to share her experience to help tech startups and companies to be up-to-date.   Getting started with React Hooks by building a counter with useState and useEffect React 16.9 releases with an asynchronous testing utility, programmatic Profiler, and more 5 Reasons to Learn ReactJS