RSSTalking to the computer
Communicating ideas and exploring them quickly While the term vibe coding has been controversial, I do think the sentiment hints…
Hi, I'm Sam Dawson
I'm a software engineer who thrives at the intersection of design and code, recently exploring AI-powered development to improve user experience outcomes.
Articles
Archiving Robust UI
Long overdue, I've archived my Robust UI e-book landing page. While the content about React component testing strategies might be…
AI coding - prototyping
Planning Using a model like o3 in ChatGPT can be useful to flesh out an idea and iterate before building anything. Once you are…
AI coding - context
A large differentiator in the quality of output you will receive from AI coding tools depends on the quality of the AI model and…
Do you need unit and end-to-end tests?
You might have a suite of end-to-end tests that cover your application well and you might be thinking do we need to duplicate our…
Private and public functions in React
With Frontend libraries like React, we often don't use classes. But the same public/private differentiation can be made through…
Redux selector test duplication
When writing integration tests (tests that do minimal mocking) I often find myself duplicating test cases. In scenarios like this…
Sharing code between gatsby-node and components
To share code between gatsby-node files and other components the shared file must use CommonJS syntax. For example: The exported…
Testing Hooks - Hooks for mass consumption
This is part three in a series on Testing Hooks The final category of hook usage is one of utility. These are hooks from…
Testing Hooks - Hooks for code reuse
This is part two in a series on Testing Hooks In the last section where we shuffled around some code to make it more readable, we…
Testing Hooks - Hooks for code organization
This is part one in a series on Testing Hooks The first category of hook usage is code organization to make our code easier to…
How to test React Hooks
The primary category of React hook usage is code reuse between components. When trying to determine a testing strategy for a…
Conclusion
Once a hook progresses to the next category through furthur development due to new needs in our applications, then we could also…
How to test Compound Components
For a quick overview on Compound Compounds check out this article. Compound components are made up of many component parts. The…
How not to GraphQL
If you're here you're probably second-guessing your usage of GraphQL. It's a great tool but if your not deliberate about your…
How to test React Context
React Context is a tool for designing flexible Component APIs. How we test it depends on the situation, we are going to explore…
How to test gatsby-node
This article will be enough to get you started with unit testing gatsby-node.js, we are not going to deep dive into every…
How to test SVG Graphs
This article is walk-through of testing a React Bar Graph with Jest and React Testing Library. The style of tests documented here…
Least effort feedback
A few months ago I added a feedback textbox to the bottom of every article. I wanted to know when someone finds there way to an…
Transforming data for simpler components
Often we can end up with complex logic in components because the shape of the data determines how we write our component code.…
How to make a dynamic interlocking image grid with CSS
grid-auto-flow: dense tells CSS grid to slot in items where there is space. This shuffles around the visual order of the…
Goodbye presentational and container components?
I had been following the Presentational and Container pattern invented by Dan Abramov, although it seems that even Dan has…
The snapshot testing tool
Kent C Dodds mentions in his article about snapshot testing when referring to a particular snapshot. "What makes this snapshot…
Union type from an array of strings
Sometimes typescript can feel like duplication, describing code that is already static (constant). Heres one trick to mitigate…
A less addictive slack experience
To some extent, it is the design of tools like slack that makes them addictive. To avoid the point of diminishing returns with…
Don't make assumptions about JS performance
After re-reading YDKJS: Async and Performance. I had the realization that I have been making over-optimizations. I had not taken…
React Component API Design
This article will go over some component API design patterns at a high level without getting into implementation details of…
Compound Components: What, Why and When.
What are Compound Components? It's a base component that expects to be combined with other component parts. Below the is the base…
useSelector vs connect (react-redux)
React-redux hooks like useSelector() and the connect() can have the same outcomes. The main difference between them is their…
When utility classes get out of control
Tailwinds utility classes make styling lighting fast (for me at least) but I have found there is a point where conditional…
Compiling NPM packages with typescript
Update: You might be better off using TSDX "TSDX is a zero-config CLI that helps you develop, test, and publish modern TypeScript…
Reacts missing conditional class utility
AngularJS has ng-class for conditionally applying classes. This is a replacement for that in React. At accelo we are in the…
Some handy git aliases
This is a list of git aliases I commonly use, mainly this is just a reference for myself for when I change computers or when…
Creating a chrome extension with parcel
This article is not a tutorial on how to build a chrome extension from scratch. Maybe you know how to make an extension with…
Tailwind theming with CSS variables
This is a solution for implementing color themes with tailwind. It makes use of CSS variables which are great providing that you…
Guidelines for css utility classes
Never override them Avoid CSS where the utility class is overridden. For example, overriding with a child selector. You want them…
z-index strategies
Let's go over some ways to keep your z-index usage sane. All in one place Keeping all of your z-indexes in one place, in order.…
Things I learned about media queries from Tailwind
I learned some things about media queries while looking into how they are used in Tailwind. It's a CSS library that generates…
A gotcha when using gatsby, tailwind and purgecss
A problem I came across when using a mix-match of tailwind, purgecss and Gatsby is that selectors used in the generated pages…
Creating category pages for gatsby markdown blogs
This article contains a strategy for creating category list pages from categories defined in a markdown article. There is an…
Inheritance media queries and css variables
This article aims to show an alternative to overriding properties directly. Instead we can use CSS variables with the help of…
Theming with current color
This article explores using the currentColor property to theme elements, to avoid writing extra CSS to override color. In cases…
Magic numbers in css
A magic number is a number or value in code that does not have an explicit meaning. In CSS maybe we don't have to be too strict…
My css color system
My approach to color usage is similar to a "no magic numbers" rule that you might find in javascript, where colors are always…
Moving elements on hover pattern
I like elements that move on hover to convey interactivity. A problem with this pattern is "flickering" that can happen when…