Alex MacArthur

Clean Up Your Redux Store Listeners When Component State Updates

I’m writing a Gutenberg block for TypeIt that’ll allow content creators to easily drop typewriter effects into WordPress. The Gutenberg infrastructure is heavily rooted in the React ecosystem, so building a block feels very much like building a React application. One piece of this ecosystem that’s new

Streamlining Conditional Statements with Logical Operators

I’ve been seeing my preference change in how I write simple conditional statements in JavaScript. Consider the following: if (snack) { eat(snack); } Back in the day, that’s how just about every “if I have this, then do this” statement looked. As complexity and context changed, I might have

If Democratic Candidates were JavaScript Packages

BernieSanders.js - a helper library for making next-generation punch card programs for the browser. ElizabethWarren.js - a probability and statistics library widely used in reservation casinos. AmyKlobuchar.js - a highly opinionated alternative to ESLint, providing harsher, more demanding errors (no warnings). JoeBiden.js - a battle-tested framework

A Plot Proposal for Frozen III

Kristoff, seeking a career more marketable than being an iceman, enrolls in a coding bootcamp in the Southern Isles, where a bitter and vengeful Prince Hans has been forced by his brothers to maintain a legacy Backbone application. Faking a change of heart, Hans befriends Kristoff, hoping to leverage his

For the Sake of Your Event Listeners, Use Web Workers

I’ve been tinkering with the Web Worker API lately, and as a result, I’m really feeling the guilt of not looking into this well-supported tool a lot sooner. Modern web applications are seriously upping demands on the browser’s main thread, impacting performance and the ability to deliver

Blog for Your Own Sake

The front-end development space is exhausting. It moves too fast, contains too much, and it won’t wait for you to catch up. It’s hard. One thing that makes it eaiser is writing about it all — the problem solving, the tinkering with new technologies, the rubber duck attempts to

Building a Shell Function to Copy the Latest Commit SHA

Frequently enough, I find myself needing to copy the SHA of the latest commit in project, and doing it manually was becoming a chore. I’d been getting more comfortable and excited about improving efficiency by rolling custom shell functions (like I wrote about here), and so this felt like

Should We All Start Implementing Differential Serving?

There’s been a lot of discussion around the potential to serve browsers the JavaScript bundles they can support. For example, if a user’s on Internet Explorer, serve a transpiled, polyfilled bundle. If they’re on a modern version of Chrome, deliver the slimmer, non-transpiled version. To accomplish this,

Deploying Code with a Git Hook on a DigitalOcean Droplet

I’ve been working on a project involving long-running, resource-intensive batch jobs in Node. At first, when my needs were simpler, I used Heroku to run these jobs. It was great, but eventually, the price:performance ratio offered became a little too unwieldy, and I chose to make a move

A Simpler Unit Testing Setup for WordPress

When I was getting started in web development, I remember how conceptually overwhelming it was to understand the whys, whats, and hows around things like unit testing. And to make it even more difficult, WordPress was the environment in which I spent most of my time — a platform not well-known

Creating a .map() Method for Objects, Strings, Sets, and Maps

It’s a well-established truth of the universe that JavaScript’s Array.prototype.map() is one of the best parts of the language, allowing us to write cleaner, simpler code to manipulate array values, instead of using something like forEach(). For example, let’s say we want to create a

Remember to Probably Target an Empty Object with Object.assign()

Hearken back, for a moment, to what it was like merging objects in 2014. There was no support for the feature in JavaScript runtimes themselves, and it was quite common to find a solution to the problem by wading through StackOverflow to find something like this: function merge(obj1, obj2)

Formatting PHP More Efficiently with a Bash Function

For quite some time now, I’ve been working with a PHP application that, up until recently, had no clearly-defined coding standards in place. At some point, the decision was made to enforce PSR-2, and to do so at an incremental level. When a file is touched, format to PSR-2.

Quickly Spin Up MySQL with Docker Compose

I’ve often needed to quickly spin up a local instance of MySQL. Docker Compose this makes it stupid easy. Rather than running a long, convoluted docker command, I can configure an image just the way I want it while maintaining the ability to turn it easily turn it on

Writing a Regular Expression to Target Images Without a Class

A while back, I wrote about building your own lazy loading functionality into WordPress. In that post, I use a regular expression to add a lazy-load class to image tags that don’t already have any class. It failed. Rather than adding it to images with no preexisting class, it

Best-ish Practices for Dynamically Prefetching & Prerendering Pages with JavaScript

Resource hints (preload, prefetch, prerender, etc.) have breathed some fresh life into the front-end performance game, especially as browsers are coming to support them more & more. For a traditional server-rendered application, a lot of these hints are pretty straightforward in terms of knowing when to implement them. For example,

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Why Using reduce() to Sequentially Resolve Promises Works

A post on CSS Tricks in which I explore why JavaScript’s reduce() method is able to help sequentually resolve a collection of Promise objects.

Introducing Better Resource Hints for WordPress

It’s easy to rattle off a bunch of ways you can improve the performance of your website: * minify your CSS & JS * optimize your images * cache the crap out of it * use a CDN * etc. Those are all important, but there’s also a more modern, less-discussed approach that

Using the posts_where Filter in WordPress

If you’ve spent 20 seconds in WordPress development, you’ve likely worked with, cursed, and fallen in love with the WP_Query class – one of the most useful, commonly used tools in any given WordPress website or application. Aside from being responsible for the main query on any given

Preloading JavaScript Assets in WordPress

Squeezing every last drop of performance out of your website on any platform is an always-changing, never-ending, often addictive battle. Among the several tactics you can employ in this fight, leveraging resource hints is a modern approach that can yield some significant ROI – with preloading is a particularly impactful place

Creating the Simplest WordPress Plugin

If you’re making modifications to the functionality of your WordPress site or application, there are generally two places where people put the code to do it. 1. A theme’s functions.php file. 2. A plugin. Given the choice, which option should you almost always choose? A plugin. Why?

Let’s Stop Making it Cool to Hate jQuery

When I started in development, beginning a new project often felt like drowning and then being asked to write some functioning JavaScript. At the time, all I needed to do was perform some DOM stuff — make an element disappear on a click, add some classes, or animate a dropdown. For

Build Your Own Simple Lazy Loading Functionality in WordPress

When you’re looking to incorporate any given feature into your WordPress application, there’s rarely a shortage of third-party plugins out there to make it happen. But sometimes, whether you’re trying to avoid the inevitable complexity an unfamiliar third-party plugin introduces, or for some other reason, you might

Building a Lambda Function with Netlify

A while back, I wrote my first Lambda function with Firebase. Like every Lambda function tutorial on the web shows you how to do, mine processes a payment via Stripe when someone purchases a license for TypeIt, the most versatile JavaScript animated typing utility on the planet. The process was

Removing Usernames from Password Reset Emails

Securely handling personal information on the web is a pretty big deal, and one of the ways you do that is making sure none of it’s sent via query string in a URL. Things like this are bad: https://your-site.com?email=booger%40email.com In fact, Google has