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ericclemmons

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Located in Austin, TX

I tweet about remote, JS/Node/React, UX, and improving developer experiences.

Find me on Twitter @ericclemmons

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In Node, I consistently reach for Knex, which is less of an ORM (like Bookshelf) and more like a query builder.

This simplifies binding, mapping, and most queries.

There have been rare situations to use ".raw", but the escape hatch id there.

As a hiring manager, I used to want to see a profile that competed with my own (at the time).

Now I've learned that (1) burnout is real, (2) work CAN be intellectually stimulating enough to not create that OSS desire, and (3) eventually your job ends at 5 and life takes over.

With that said, I WISH more developers opened issues on the projects they've used.

All too often I've seen people drop one dependency for another due to an edge-case.

Even a simple issue explaining the problem, providing a test case or sample code would be great as an indicator to how a developer approaches problems and seeks help.

What's exciting to me, having tested graph.cool and others, they are fantastic at providing an API in a format that works quite well (GraphQL) and handing the admin for me.

I don't want to build admin anymore.

Frankly, I'll spend more money at the service with the best admin UX.

It's like MixPanel for analytics. I can perform complex queries and analysis with minimal friction, which makes it worth the cost.

"Owning" isn't a selling point for me, when all of the services make it possible to dump the data.

I've struggled with helping people out of this rut.

On the tech side, people come to me with solutions they want to see live, and spend 10x the time there than describing the root problem.

Equally important is asking "why not" to alternative scenarios, as it fleshed out the scope of the root problem, often vetting the initial solution or finding a better one.

Dear Microsoft 10 years ago

The UX is top notch. Not only is the UI polished, but big details like mentioning someone and an invite link appearing is awesome. Or force-pinging someone on DnD because of an emergency.

Slack is seriously user-centric, all the way down to how they run their Twitter.

I was able to rebuild a week's worth of Redux work in MobX within a day. And that's having never used it before.

What's crazy is how MobX is able to update React child components without updating the parent first. It knows which properties are accessed in each component, and ensures only the ones that rely on the changed data are updated.

I'd say give it a shot the next time you have a component with internal state. Not having to worry about the reducer or how the component gets updated is refreshing.

It's interesting that the author states that the majority of traffic cams from Reddit.

When I browse r/javascript, r/react, r/programming, etc. its practically a ghost town: 0 comments on nearly everything and only a dozen posts a day.

I'm guilty of this. I was in a 1.5 hour meeting that started out relevant, but then the conversation devolved into tons of specifics on how the reports were gathered and created, and I went straight to the phone.

It seems the greatest burden on the organizer is the same as a presenter: how do you present the information in an impactful, terse way with the least "noise" so that attendees are inclined not to seek distractions?

One thing I know for sure, sitting on a single slide for 5 full minutes feels like a slog.

We provide 3rd party widgets to sites and originally built them all to leverage jQuery, which has been on 100% of them so far.

However, we prefer React components. Within a week, we were able to convert the jQuery widgets into React components and bundle with Preact.

What's funny is that it ended up being a smaller bundle due to complex logic it took to make jQuery render and update the DOM from existing state. (React's bread and butter)

GitHub Corners 10 years ago

Be careful with these, especially on mobile.

I've often encountered a project with a "Docs" link that got hidden or blocked by it.

I'm glad this feature is in, but it's only useful for my PRs.

For example, there was a recent PR where the owner was modeling the UI for a feature with stubbed calls, while I was setting up the backend.

Once my work was done, he wrapped up the rest, and I was no longer needed.

We used notifications to informally say "you're still needed for this!" vs it being part of my daily hit list.

Having worked on a project recently where we chose jQuery (because it was already on the page and we didn't want to delay page load), what I missed about React was the luxury of re-rendering the view from state.

Doing so with jQuery blows away the DOM (causing inputs to lose focus), so we ended up with the usual jQuery soup referencing the DOM for state.

Shucks. I just bought eero over OnHub because the former seems to answer the multi- floor wireless solution than OnHub.

I'm in a 4-story town home with PoE between floors, which works great, but Apple's AirPort Extreme + Express CONSISTENTLY stops resolving DNS while the wired connections are fine.

Looks like I have another alternative if eero doesn't work...

I think most of the commenters are missing the point of the tests.

Having sat through a few meetings about "the best way to design FB ads", I've actually heard a few of these "myths" as converting best.

And they meant CPC. Because the goal for lots of ads is to get the foot in the door, then optimize the rest of the funnel.

The initial click is often the hardest, which is why this article is testing the myths against the CPC, since the overall conversation differs greatly once past that.

I totally agree with this, even down to the library/framework level (where bootstrapping is 90% the same for most users).

Speaking of automation, I've found that doing automated releases in CI has significantly lowered the barrier for creating and maintaining open source.

I've had issues with Mint and USAA, which is a shame because the only features I want are:

- Frequent automated syncing. - Running balance for recent transactions.

I know when payday is. I know when I'm off track or not.

It's the surprise transactions or expenditures that are easy to skim through but vital to stay on top of finances when everything is automated or paid online.

These could've come in handy after my JavaScript Fatigue post blew up (I called it the "Abramov Effect").

Instead, I just declined to read a single response, and ignored as much Twitter noise as I could.

Like many others, I post to document my experiences or write something cathartic.

The feedback of respected peers has already happened by then. After the impact, the signal to noise ratio is too low.

I think this is a great idea.

Having something for accountability (besides fighting one's own addiction) is helpful.

I've found myself responding at stop lights, which inevitably means finishing a text after the light turns green.

It looks like this app does a good job of communicating the most important statuses on the user's behalf, removing that responsibility.