Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
14 results shown.
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.Runpkg v1.0 - The node packages explorer
December 4, 2019Earlier in the year we released Runpkg, an online tool to help developers explore npm packages and their dependencies. We were pleased with the results, but, as with any prototype, there was room for improvement. Over the past few weeks, we were able to iterate on our prototype to improve the package viewing experience, the performance and speed of the site, and the overall design and user experience. Today we are delighted to announce the release of Runpkg v1.Meet Emma Brillhart
November 14, 2019We'd like to introduce you to Emma Brillhart. Emma is a senior developer, engineering manager, experienced speaker, co-lead of our newest office in Phoenix, Arizona, and now leads our DevRel program at Formidable.urql DevTools: Introducing Explorer View
October 17, 2019In its current state, the urql DevTools make it easy to understand how these responses come in, but you’re still not able to observe your GraphQL data as a whole. We wanted a simpler way for users to see what data their app is currently consuming with a clear overview of which exact query produced which response, without the need to check the network tab manually. We also wanted to see that data update in real time and include any metadata such as cache outcomes as part of the view.
