Keep updating those snapshots, don’t bother looking at them, and stop complaining about them — I’ve heard many complaints about Storybook StoryShots and Jest snapshot testing at work, online, and various Slack groups. Some of the complaints I’ve heard are: It’s annoying because you always have to update the snapshots It makes the git diff very large It doesn’t actually guarantee anything It creates a…

Don’t use redux-thunk, especially in the 2020s — When starting with React, many people being using redux with redux-thunk. After first seeing it many years ago, I quickly smelled many anti-patterns and tried to move teams off of it. Nowadays, with Apollo GraphQL, React Context, and React Hooks among other features, there’s less reason to use it anyways. GitHub - reduxjs/redux-thunk: Thunk middleware for Redux Thunk middleware for Redux. npm install redux-thunk yarn add redux-thunk Most tutorials today assume that you're using…github.com

As an engineering hiring manager, learn how to spot them so that you can hire them at the appropriate level. — When I first became a manager, my boss told me, “We just interviewed this person and they were great. We’re going to hire them under you”. I was pretty excited at first, but after I looked at their resume, I realized that they didn’t actually have any professional engineering experience…

You may not need to cache your entire node_modules — node_modules/.cache is a community-standard cache folder for storing files. Many projects such as ava, nyc, storybook, and many webpack loaders and plugins use this folder by default. With some configuration, you can speed up your CI and developer experience by pointing other caches to this folder and persisting it across…

A strategy to plan a healthy balance of product & engineering work for your teams — Every company I’ve worked at/with has struggled to prioritize engineering work against product work. Most of them have tried to solve this by dedicating a percentage of their engineering capacity on engineering work. If done right, allocating capacity across categories provides a feedback loop that can provide insight into your…

Recent changes in GitHub made Dependabot a pain in the ass. Here’s a potential solution for your organization. — Recently, a bunch of Dependabot PRs that required GitHub Action Secrets began to fail, which brought me to this article from GitHub: GitHub Actions: Workflows triggered by Dependabot PRs will run with read-only permissions | GitHub… Starting March 1st, 2021 workflow runs that are triggered by Dependabot from push, pull_request, pull_request_review…github.blog

Synology is one of the most popular manufacturers of Network-attached Storage systems. I bought my Synology DS416play over three years ago and it never performed how I wanted it to be until recently. Here are the steps and resources I used to get it decently performant. May 26th, 2020 Update…

Simple basic configurations for using Imgix to optimize and serve your images. — There are numerous blog posts on how to optimize images, but none are quite straightforward as I would like. The idea behind this post is to give you quick, direct steps to optimize your images using Imgix, though using other services would be very similar. Only serve your highest quality image as the master asset Your graphic design team shouldn’t…

Here at Dollar Shave Club, our frontend team has created a new monitoring solution to allow us to increase our monitoring cadence, speed, and coverage, all of which were lacking when we relied on 3rd party monitoring services. Our engineering teams’ response time to outages has improved significantly with this…