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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Living on the Edge: Lazy Static Sites with Modern CDNs and Lambda
October 15, 2019Websites like the New York Times can't wait for a twenty-minute build to deliver breaking stories. A CDN-based service like unpkg can't build a static filesystem for every possible npm package without exorbitant storage and compute costs. Yet these services stay fast in spite of the pitfalls of dynamic sites. How?Responsive Images: Improving performance by letting the browser do the work
October 8, 2019We want to serve appropriate images to all of our users, like small images on slower connections and small screens, and large, high-quality images on fast connections and high-resolution screens. Luckily, all modern browsers support a few nifty HTML features to help us optimize our images for whatever device your users are visiting your site on.Building a more accessible web with semantic HTML
October 2, 2019I want to make a case for semantic HTML as a way to unlock the door to building accessible apps from the ground up. Accessibility is something that we must get better at slowly, not overnight, and if we do, we will end up saving time and become stronger developers.Say Hello to Kate Schaefer
September 12, 2019Our Formidable Denver office is growing! Please meet Kate Schaefer, a software engineer from Colorado.Progress Towards OSS Sustainability
August 28, 2019Open source sustainability has been an increasingly visible problem in recent years. The problem is too big for any one person, or any one company to solve, but at Formidable, we're hoping to make a very small, local dent by making open source work more sustainable for our business and for our engineers.Input Smoothing: An Intro To Reactive Animations
August 16, 2019A tutorial on how to make an input smoothing object from scratch and leverage it in a React component to smoothly animate a cursor.Glicky: A Graphical User Interface for JavaScript Development Workflows
June 18, 2019Modern web development is hard. Long gone are the days of opening up your text editor, writing some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, saving it to an index.html file, and loading it in your browser. For many of us, fiddling with package.json and interacting with the terminal seems easy, because we've done it for a long time. But do you remember how you felt the first time you were faced with a terminal?Meet Jon Reynolds
June 18, 2019We're launching a new blog series to showcase our talented team of Formidables across the globe. We're delighted to introduce you to Jon Reynolds from the Formidable Denver office.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.
