Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
14 results shown.
How To Create an Ideal Design to Dev Workflow
June 13, 2019Products that require both design and engineering find an inflection point in their lifecycle that can cause confusion, delay production, and add multiple headaches further down the road. Specifically stated, that point is when the thing that is designed must now be made. How can we, as both designers and developers, mitigate these risks and foster a more inclusive workflow that ensures the final designs are not only beautiful, but functional and developmentally sound?Jetpack: multiple engines for your Serverless packaging and more!
June 11, 2019The 'serverless-jetpack' plugin continues its mission to make Serverless Framework packaging and deployment rocket-fast with new features including parallel build workers, full monorepo support, and a dedicated packaging CLI.Placing Radium Into Maintenance Mode
June 4, 2019It has been more than four years since @vjeux proposed a revolutionary new idea for styling React components using javascript APIs. This CSS-in-JS talk sparked a wave of innovation in React open source community as we experimented with new ways to apply styles to our React components. Radium was one of the early tools to provide APIs for interop between JavaScript and DOM style tags, and allowed React developers to avoid specificity conflicts by scoping styles to DOM elements.Urql, Grown Up
May 31, 2019Early 2018 we released the first version of our minimalist GraphQL client `urql`. For the last year, we’ve been rethinking, rearchitecting, and rebuilding the core of the library, and a few months ago we silently launched `urql` v1.0. Today, with the release of the new documentation site, we’re happy to call `urql` a stable, production-ready GraphQL client library for both small and large React applications.Head-First into Open Source
May 30, 2019As more and more people enter the software industry each year, companies can benefit from learning how to bring out the best in their engineers. To that point, this is the story of how my team at Formidable and I quickly built something ambitious and valuable, without compromising my learning, support, and autonomy along the way.End-to-End Testing React Applications with Cypress
May 29, 2019When it comes to end-to-end testing React applications, Cypress is rapidly emerging as the community standard. While nothing about Cypress is React-specific, the design of its APIs pairs uniquely well with the nuances of React's reconciliation process and virtual DOM. In this post we'll dig into how Cypress works with React, focusing specifically on how it addresses the challenges of DOM-based testing and manipulation in the era of asynchronous web applications.Jetpack revisited: Even faster Serverless packaging and deploys
May 28, 2019After introducing the 'serverless-jetpack' plugin two weeks ago, we took the entire problem back to the drawing board and came up with an even faster and more robust method of packaging and deploying Serverless Framework applications.Game of Types: A Song of GraphQL and TypeScript
May 23, 2019Over the last few years, the popularity of both GraphQL and TypeScript has exploded in the web ecosystem—and for good reason: They help developers solve real problems encountered when building modern web applications. One of the primary benefits of both technologies is their strongly typed nature.CI/CD In a Build-free World
May 21, 2019Because of the build step and the increased complexity of our apps, Continuous Integration tools and processes have become an essential part of web development. But builds themselves are not why CI is valuable, they're just a side effect of the approach we as an industry have gravitated towards, and they have some drawbacks.Tipple: Stealing Ideas From GraphQL and Putting Them to REST
May 16, 2019You've been using Redux for a while now. It was exciting at first, but the amount of code you need to ship a new feature is starting to creep upwards. With every new addition to the backend, you find yourself making sweeping changes across the project. Actions, reducers, containers — it feels like you're touching every file in the codebase and you ask yourself: Were things always this complicated?Jetpack: blazingly fast Serverless packaging and deploys
May 14, 2019The Serverless Framework is amazing, but can become incredibly slow to package and deploy applications as projects grow. We introduce the 'serverless-jetpack' plugin, a drop-in replacement for normal Serverless behavior, that offers significantly faster packaging and deployment speed.runpkg: The Online Package Explorer
May 13, 2019We are seeing advances in browser technologies that have the potential to change the way we write applications on the web. Now that ES6 modules are well on their way to being supported by all evergreen browsers, we may no longer need to build and bundle our JavaScript code using complex and proprietary tooling. Our source code is becoming our distributed code!Paying Cold, Hard Cash for Open Source Contributions
May 2, 2019At Formidable, open source is at the heart of everything we do. We help our clients build mission-critical systems using open source technologies like React, Node, GraphQL, and dozens of others. In return we contribute back to these projects, and give our engineers dedicated time to maintain more than 70 of our own open source projects that others can build upon. But recently we’ve come to realize this is not enough.OSS Maintenance Levels
April 17, 2019As Formidable has grown, we have continuously added projects to our portfolio, and today we have more than 70 open source projects that are downloaded and used a couple of million times each week. We try hard to make sure the software we build and maintain is reliable and useful. But how can we continue to maintain and improve every project in our ever-growing open source portfolio?
