October 20, 2016

I’ve had the pleasure to work on a book about React — React in Action — for Manning this year. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m so excited that it’s starting to be publicly available now through the MEAP program! You can download the first chapter for FREE here. For a short while, you’ll be able to use the discount code mlthomas to get 50% off the MEAP!

October 20, 2016

You might have seen my post from the other day about my upcoming book on React. I’m so excited to be working on this project and would love for you to be able to take part in learning about React and improving the book as it comes together. Today, React in Action is part of Manning’s Deal of the Day offering. You can get 50% off your order if you follow this link (make sure to use code DOTD102016LT).

October 15, 2016

This year, I’ve had the pleasure to have been working on a book about React for Manning Publications. It’s been a humbling, hard, fun, and extremely rewarding experience so far. I am deeply thankful to my wife, family, friends, and all the people at Manning who have supported me in this endeavor! Writing has always been a passion of mine and it’s long been a goal of mine to write and publish a book.

May 19, 2016

#Adam Grant: The surprising habits of original thinkers Just wanted to share this great TED talk about original thinking; hoping it helps developers think better about the role of procrastination in original thinking.

April 18, 2016

Since it seems to be the vogue inevitability for JS/Node engineers to dabble in Go, I am inevitably, well, dabbling in Go. My experience with the language so far has been an extremely pleasant one. In many ways it has been like sipping a surprisingly good cup of espresso that I hadn’t tried before. Furthermore, the approach it takes to extending functionality has been incredible; it’s composition over inheritance, but built into the language.

April 18, 2016

tl;dr: I’m following up on my “Start Simply, Simply Start” from a bit ago with some more practical thoughts on starting simply. My hope is to also write on the second of these ideas, “On Simply Starting.” Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability Edsger W. Djikstra I wrote a short(ish) post a bit ago about starting and starting simply. It was a rather “in the moment” piece of writing, not one I’d spent a long time actually composing.

April 4, 2016

I originally wrote this as a tutorial for Semaphore CI’s community site; I am republishing my own work here :) Testing React Components with Enzyme and Mocha Introduction Even if you only dabble in the JavaScript world, you have probably heard of React. React has become an increasingly popular and widely-used JavaScript application tool for developing web applications. Popular frameworks like Angular.js, Ember.js, and Backbone have traditionally been go-to choices for front-end application development, but React came onto the scene in 2013 has provided front-end engineers with (yet) another substantial alternative.

March 24, 2016

tl;dr: Start Simply: Use, build, learn what you need when you need it. Simply Start: Don’t let everything get in the way of doing something. There’s been a lot of talk, writing, presentations, and tweeting over the past year-ish about the sheer pace of development, proliferation of tools, and overall craziness of the JavaScript universe. Whether it’s been endless framework proliferation, tooling insanity, or whatever else, I’ve gotten the sense that people are equally as excited about the new things people are doing with JavaScript as they are fatigued and overwhelmed by everything.

February 23, 2016

Code for tutorial available on Github Get Your Priorities Straight Chances are that if you’ve worked on the server side of things for long enough, you’ve probably run into a situation where you need a queue of some sort to handle messaging, processing, or any sort of orderly task execution. In this tutorial, we’ll be using a certain type of queue — the priority job queue — to help us solve a fairly common problem: payment processing.

February 12, 2016

a “stream” of events, being emitted from a waterfall… eh? ¯\(ツ)/¯ tl;dr: In this post we will look at using the Event Emitter module in node.js and how we might use it to create our own event-emitting programs. The repo with some sample code can be found at https://github.com/markthethomas/eventEmitterFun If you’ve worked with client-side JavaScript, you will be familiar with the notion of events. Or, at the very least, I really really hope you are — JavaScript isn’t much fun without one of its core concepts/principles.