Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
14 results shown.
urql Devtools: The Road to V1
April 28, 2020In 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, 2020Submitting 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, 2020Want 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, 2020Formidable, 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, 2020There 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, 2020At 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, 2020When 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, 2020In 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, 2020When 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, 2020In 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, 2020A 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, 2020Since 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.Introducing Renature: Experimenting with Physics for UI Animation
December 18, 2019For this first fellowship, Parker Ziegler, in collaboration with others at Formidable, is working on a new physics-based animation library for React focused on modeling natural-world forces like gravity, friction, air resistance, and fluid dynamics. The project is called renature, harkening to the inspiration it takes from the physics of our universe. It's targeted at UI developers, digital artists, and physics nerds alike. In this post, we'll introduce the motivations behind writing renature, highlight some of the technology we're using to build it, and show off the progress we've made in these first two weeks!The UX Deck: Card-Based Testing for Better Design
December 12, 2019Formidable design team has developed a card-based user testing model to meet the needs of client projects that require early-stage research and concept validation. As part of our commitment to open source, we are sharing our learnings and best practices related to this methodology. Here's what it is, how to use it, and where to get your own copy.
