Reading this Week

When I initially thought about starting a blog, part of my motivation was to have a place to keep useful resources that I come across. I had been relying on Twitter to do that, but its ephermal nature makes it hard to go back and find what I need. Now that I have updated my site to use Gatsby, it’s easier to update so I’m looking forward to doing these posts more often.

React

• The Iceberg of React Hooks - Even though it’s been several months, hooks in React are still a popular topic. This post is a bit older but it does a good job of highlight some of the potential issues with hooks.
• 10 Tips & Tricks that will make you a better ReactJS Dev - There’s some nice quick tips in here to help level up your React skills as well as some more advanced suggestions.
• Demonstrating Reusable React Components in a Form - This article does a good job looking at some of the ways in which you can make use of reusable components to make a form.

Web Development

• Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web - This is a nice research-based overview of Progressive Web Apps and the benefits that they offer.
• Optimizing images for the web - an in-depth guide - This guide offers a ton of suggestions on how to optimize images to improve web performance. It includes both manual as well as automated ways of doing it. Image optimization is an easy way to improve performance but is frequently overlooked.
• Meeting GraphQL at a Cocktail Mixer - A humorous comparison of GraphQL and REST.
• HEAD: A free guide to HTML5 HEAD Elements - A nice overview of all things that can be included in the HEAD area of your HTML5 documents.
• Google’s Layout Changes and What They Mean for Your SEO - It’s worth keeping up on SEO best practices and this is a nice article discussing recent changes to Google’s search layout and what it means for SEO.
• 7 Important Tips for Writing Better CSS - While I would like to think most of these tips are standard practice, my hunch is that they are not. For those looking to improve the efficiency of how they write CSS, this is a nice list of easy improvements you can implement.

Books

• Atomic Design - I have been reading Brad Frost’s classic book over the past week. It contains a wealth of insight on how to break an interface/website down into small building blocks. With so much of front-end web development moving in the component direction, this has been a helpful resource for me to think more in terms of reusable components.