Our Latest Insights

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

14 results shown.
  • The New React Native Architecture Explained

    March 26, 2019
    In 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, 2019
    Backend 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, 2019
    The 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, 2019
    MongoDB 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, 2019
    Observation 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, 2019
    The 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, 2019
    Some 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, 2018
    A 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?
  • Nuka Carousel Gets Accessibility Updates, New Features

    December 12, 2018
    Over the past couple of months, we have made some exciting new changes to Nuka Carousel. Along with fixing several overdue issues, we are most excited about fixing accessibility issues with the carousel component.
  • Moving with Intention: One Dancer's Journey to JavaScript

    December 5, 2018
    Anyone with passion can become a programmer. That same level of dedication, sacrifice, and intent is what’s needed to be successful. If you surround yourself with people who are passionate about a subject you are interested in, it is always inspirational.
  • YesNo: Better HTTP Testing

    November 27, 2018
    YesNo is a new library for Node.js that simplifies how we write tests asserting the actual behavior of our HTTP requests.
  • Finding and fixing duplicates in webpack with Inspectpack

    October 31, 2018
    Needlessly duplicated dependencies produce larger, slower web applications. Let's embark on a deep dive into how npm and webpack work, see how inefficient duplicates can arise, and learn how the Inspectpack duplicates plugin can help.
  • Hooked

    October 25, 2018
    We're very excited about what we learned at React Conf and we wanted to share our take on React Hooks, a new React API that gives React functional components the ability to use state and controlled side effects without the need for any additional helper libraries.
  • Announcing Spectacle Boilerplate MDX

    October 15, 2018
    Formidable is thrilled to announce the release of Spectacle Boilerplate MDX. Now you can write your Spectacle presentations in markdown while seamlessly including React components and JSX.