Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
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The New React Native Architecture Explained: Part Four
April 16, 2019In this final post we tackle the last block of the old architecture graph presented in the first article.Lightweight Client-Side Tests with React-Testing-Library
April 11, 2019I have a confession to make: I usually dread writing tests. I especially dread writing them early on in a project, when components are still subject to rapid change and iteration. A few weeks ago, I found myself in that position—I had written new components that needed test coverage, but I knew there were several iterations of both designs and features ahead of us.The New React Native Architecture Explained: Part Three
April 9, 2019In part three of our four-part series we will dive into the “meaty” part of the re-architecture, the one that every React Native developer has probably heard about: Fabric and TurboModules.Don’t Build That App!
April 4, 2019I ask that you forget what you know and take a few minutes to read this post in the hope that you too can be persuaded to liberate yourself from a toolchain conglomerate that once helped us be more productive, but is now almost certainly introducing unnecessary complexity, limitations, and overhead to our web apps and dev environments.The New React Native Architecture Explained: Part Two
April 2, 2019In part two of our four-part series we will dive into how React Native consumes the code you write, and how the re-architecture changes it.New Spectacle Lander
April 1, 2019Formidable and the Spectacle team are excited to announce the launch of the new Spectacle lander on the Formidable website! We've updated the branding and brought the lander more in line with our company's overall brand.The New React Native Architecture Explained
March 26, 2019In this first post in a four-part series, we discuss the aspect of the React Native re-architecture that will actually affect the code you may write—the new React features and a tool called Codegen.Locking down AWS Serverless applications, the right way
March 14, 2019Backend services built with the Serverless Framework on AWS Lambda are enormously popular and powerful, but unfortunately often difficult to secure in the cloud. We present the terraform-aws-serverless project, which provides battle-tested, fine-grained IAM privilege isolation to help lock down your Serverless Framework applications.Upgrading styled-components from v3 to v4
February 20, 2019The v4 release of styled-components comes with a lot of features and perfomance wins that we were excited about. If you're like me, you might look at the official v3 to v4 migration guide, see the codemod, and feel pretty confident that the migration should take you less than a day! Welp, I was wrong. Here are a few gotchas I ran into.Blazing Fast Testing in Node with MongoDB
February 6, 2019MongoDB is a document-based NoSQL database, and is a popular choice for applications in the Node ecosystem. This post is about testing in Node with MongoDB, however, and not about why you should or should not use MongoDB, so I’ll leave it to the pundits on Hacker News to hash that out.Observation as a prerequisite for design
January 30, 2019Observation as a discipline is difficult to summarize, and sometimes even harder to express— it is a talent that takes practice. When performed well, design seems to be obvious, to be the natural state of things.Your 2019 JavaScript Reading List
January 23, 2019The internet can be a veritable treasure trove of resources IF you know where to look. We asked our staff to share some of their go-to sites for help, inspiration, breaking news, and more. Below are the top recommendations for 2019 from five members of the Formidable staff.Real-World Performance Wins: an E-Commerce Case Study
January 15, 2019Some of my favorite projects are website performance audits. Hunting for opportunities to make an application faster and leaner can be exciting. Recently Tyler Thompson and I had a chance to dive into an e-commerce website’s codebase and search for performance opportunities during a quick two-week sprint.Implementing a Distributed Lock State Machine
December 17, 2018A complex distributed computing problem application developers may encounter is controlling access to a resource or entity in a multi-user, concurrent environment. How can we guard against an arbitrary number of concurrent processes from potentially mutating or even having any access to an entity simultaneously?
