Our Latest Insights

Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.

14 results shown.
  • Retail in the Time of Coronavirus: Today and Beyond Quarantine

    May 18, 2020
    Current pandemic conditions have rapidly accelerated the rate of adoption of digital products in the retail industry. What happens when the shops reopen? We have a few projections.
  • Introducing the New Formidable Brand

    April 29, 2020
    Formidable has experienced extraordinary growth in the past few years. Yet, our overall brand was not able to keep up with the increasing burden of our growing footprint. So we set out to fix it.
  • urql Devtools: The Road to V1

    April 28, 2020
    In June 2019 we (the urql team) decided to set an adventurous goal of creating fully-featured developer tool for our GraphQL client. 10+ months, 10+ contributors, and 100+ pull requests later, we're proud to announce our first major release! Read on for the journey on how we got there.
  • The Many Benefits of Good Pull Request Descriptions (+ How to Write One)

    April 20, 2020
    Submitting pull requests (PR) is a key part of our jobs as software engineers. When we take time to write a good PR description we're improving our code, our teams, and our understanding. Let's walk through some of the benefits we've noticed and then talk about how to write A+ descriptions on your own.
  • Jetpack: trace your way to faster and smaller Serverless packages

    April 2, 2020
    Want faster-than-ever-before packaging speeds combined with the smallest possible bundle size for your Serverless Framework application? Come meet the new tracing mode for the 'serverless-jetpack' plugin!
  • Working Remotely: The Ups, Downs, and Sideways

    March 31, 2020
    Formidable, by design, is a distributed global company uniquely suited for remote work. Most of us choose to work remotely part of the time, and more than a dozen of us are what we consider "permanently remote". So when current conditions necessitated that we all shift to remote work, we decided to share some of our best practices back with the community. In this post, we highlight what works for our staff, what doesn't, and allow you to choose what you can adapt to your own WFH situations.
  • Managing Remote Teams

    March 24, 2020
    There is a lot of great information being shared right now on how to work from home and how to manage a team working from home. Managing a completely remote team is different in many ways from managing a team in an office. We want to share some general behaviors that lead to better alignment and effectiveness while managing a remote team.
  • A New Generation For Spectacle

    March 10, 2020
    At Formidable we spent the last five months working on a rewrite of Spectacle. We started with some clear goals to set Spectacle up well for the future: a modern internal architecture that’s easier to contribute to, faster authoring experience, consistent theming system, and the elimination of external boilerplates and scripts. Welcome to Spectacle 6!
  • Fixture-first Development

    March 3, 2020
    When you hear the word "Storybook", you probably think UI libraries. Tools like Storybook and Cosmos have been around for a few years now and do a pretty awesome job of presenting UI components in isolation. What most don't consider, however, is how these tools can go beyond just presenting UI components.
  • How to urql, Part 2: Authentication & Multiple Users

    February 26, 2020
    In the last blog-post we covered the basics on how to query and mutate our data; in real-world applications, there's more to it. In this post, we'll cover setting an authentication token and handling multiple users interacting with the same data.
  • How to urql, Part 1

    February 10, 2020
    When picking a GraphQL client for React, many default to using Apollo or Relay, but now there’s a new kid on the block rising in popularity over the last year: Its name is urql. It's not as packed with features as other GraphQL clients. Instead, urql aims to be minimal and highly customizable. This blog post series will start by walking you through getting started with urql, and then move on to more advanced topics like subscriptions, normalised caching, etc.
  • Reflections on Renature

    February 6, 2020
    In this final post in our three-part series on renature, Parker looks back on how this whole thing started, what we accomplished in the six weeks, and what programs like the Fellowship mean for our commitment to open source sustainability.
  • Our Newest Office is Now Open In Phoenix/Tempe

    January 15, 2020
    A year ago at Formidable we began to consider a new expansion city beyond Seattle, Denver, and London. Today we're celebrating the official launch of our office, and formalizing our commitment to growth in the Phoenix-Tempe metro area.
  • Building Physics-Based Animations with renature

    January 12, 2020
    Since the initial announcement of the renature project we've made a lot of progress, adding full support for three forces and beginning to scaffold out an API for pausing, reversing, and replaying animations while preserving the simplicity of our tiny hooks API.