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Recent Publications

Z-Index 99999: A CSS Conundrum

Unlocking the mysteries behind the CSS Stacking Context

The z-index property is a source of constant frustration as it often fails to behave as expected. This may be due to the stacking context; a fundamental concept that underpins the z-index property. It plays a pivotal role in determining how z-indices work, however, despite its significance, the stacking context remains an overlooked concept. In this article, we delve into the intricate relationship between stacking context and z-indices, shedding light on one of the most irritating questions in CSS: why does setting a z-index value as high as 99999 sometimes not work?

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What's at the edge?

Exploring serverless and edge computing

As technology races forward, the need for tools and infrastructure that facilitate rapid and efficient data delivery becomes increasingly pressing. This article explores technologies like serverless and edge computing as solutions that allow us to meet the demand for faster and more efficient data delivery. We examine the intricacies of edge computing and we uncover its advantages and disadvantages, while also exploring its potential impact.

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Battling CSS style collisions with the superpowers of the cascade

A deep dive into Cascade Layers

We've all experienced CSS style collisions in our codebase when writing new styles or adding new 3rd-party styling libraries. This can make working with CSS incredibly frustrating sometimes! However, there have been some new additions to the CSS spec that makes working with the cascade a bit easier. This article explores cascade layers and how they rework our approach to organizing and structuring styles within CSS.

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Thinking about a new responsive web

A deep dive into container queries

Design on the web has changed drastically over the years. Tools such as media queries, flexbox, and CSS grid allow developers to reshape layouts on the web to suit the devices of many users. Although we are still iterating and uncovering answers to questions that drive the user experience on websites, the shift to component-based development has made it increasingly important to think about how components define their own layout. This article explores container queries and how they iterate on the idea of micro-layouts.

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What does it mean to containerize an application?

Setting up another development environment can be a tedious landscape to navigate. It slows the build process as you first have to set up all the dependencies. Moreover, in a production setting, those same dependencies must be set up before your application becomes accessible. This article explores what it means to containerize an application and why developers may want to opt into this approach as their application grows.

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How do we design algorithms that scale with our data?

An exploration into sorting algorithms

Data structures & Algorithms (DSA) may be the bain of every computer science student's existence; it sure was mine. But after contributing to/writing software for small businesses and personal projects, I can appreciate why it's important to learn and its specific use cases. This article explores the sorting algorithms part of DSA's and tours through the importance and use cases of various sorting algorithms.

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How does an app know to change the appearance of a button once it's pressed?

Uncovering what is means to conditional render a component

You've just stumbled across the about page of this blog and realized that you have an option of reading either a short or long version of the description. You start to wonder how a feature like this can be created. In short, it's all based on conditional rendering. In this article, we will explore the topic of conditional rendering and how we can use it to create custom experiences based on user input.

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Let's not over-engineer things

A look into how the word game Clueless Words picks a new word everyday

Games like Wordle, Clueless Words, Nerdle, and so on somehow generate a new word/puzzle every day. It's an aspect of these games that are not thought about from the player's perspective at least not until one of the players tries to build a daily puzzle. In this article, I explore different ways to pick a new word/puzzle every day and the pros & cons of each approach.

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Selecting parent elements has become easier

unwrapping the :has selector in CSS

CSS has a lot of ways to select elements in the HTML and so many options can make it difficult to choose which method is most sufficient. The :has selector gives us another way to select parent elements but it allows us to do so much more. Here we deep dive into what the :has selector is and explore different use cases

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State Management in React

The guide to why you should manage your state within react

Properly managing state within a react application can greatly improve the developer experience and accessibility to information needed by specific components. In this article we'll explore why and how to properly manage state within a react application.

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React Router V6

The guide to routing within react, not using a framework

You may be familiar with websites having multiple pages which are interconnected and allows users to navigate to different areas of your website. Naturally, when we want to add a new page to our website, we can just create a new HTML file and link it to other pages using the anchor tag ( `<a></a>`). Additionally, other pages can then link page to this newly created page with the same anchor tag. This doesn't quite work the same when we are using something like react as react results in a single page application (SPA) -- an application that only has one HTML file. So the question then becomes how do we simulate a multiple-page experience within a SPA?

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How can we create a real-time search filter on the client side?

The javascript Filter Method

We're going to be using some javascript to simulate a real-time search feature in an application. The filter method which can be used on any iterable provides us a way create the search feature. Today, we are going to be exploring the javascript filter method and its use cases.

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LetsCreate: React Counter Component

The first step to understanding state in react

When I started with React, the first thing I thought was ughh yet another framework to learn but honestly after using it for the past couple of years, React has really grown on me. It fun to work with but there is always that question someone has when getting started -- Where do I even begin? This article will be exploring the basics of react, react hooks, and we will walk through how to create your first react application.

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How can we automate a simple task to make our lives easier?

Let's create a UUID generator

So you need to sign up participants to this game that your team is building and you realize that you need some way to identify each participant other than their name because for the obvious reason there are multiple participants that may have the same name. Your project manager has suggested that you use a unique identifier for each participant but has insisted that this identifier be of an alphanumeric value. In this article, we'll explore how to create a UUID generator to get a text file on our desktop that is populated the number of unique identifiers that asked for.

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Dark Mode: Not as simple as inverting the colours

How to properly create dark mode for an application

Dark mode, a fan favourite amongst developers and user alike. I find that there are a lot of nuances about creating dark theme for a website/application that are missed -- it isn't really as simple as inverting the colour scheme of your website/application. In this article we will explore some of those nuances and find how to create an effective dark theme.

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