Tag: webdev

  • End to end testing – Cypress basics

    When you’ve made a change to your web-app, do you run it then click around the new bits to check it works? Good start, but instead of doing that yourself, do it in a faster, more comprehensive and automated way with an end-to-end (E2E) testing setup using Cypress. Here’s how. E2E End to End testing…

  • User Sessions & Cookies in Node

    When you are learning app development, you can create all sorts of apps that work for you, but for any serious app, it’s going to need to authenticate users and persist sessions across visits. So much so, that as a professional developer, you’ll probably build that out first – it becomes a sort of boiler…

  • React Expense Tracker App

    I’m focused on React frontend skills these holidays, and working through Mosh’s React 18 course. The exercise today (which I think I nailed, although I spent more than the recommended hour on) was a small app to track expenses. Like most of Mosh’s exercises it was great because it exercised all the understandings up to…

  • CSS for React Components

    If you think back to HTML as being a document with headings and paragraphs and other semantic bits, it made a lot of sense to have the styles (expressed as CSS) separate to the document. This allows us to change the styles without touching the document – perhaps the user wanted a dark theme, needed…

  • React – a To Do Example

    Since I’m on a roll making different versions of the To Do app, this might be a good time to talk about React. React is one of the giants of front end libraries. It’s based on a few big ideas – and to work effectively in React you need to wrap your head around these.…

  • htmx – A To Do Example

    HTMX is an interesting project to me, and I’ve used it a bit in my large collection of 70% completed side projects, but haven’t really discussed it here. The plan for this post is to talk briefly about what it is exactly, then convert a simple ‘conventional’ (HTML/CSS/Javascript) app to htmx and think about some…

  • Adding Front Matter To mdserver

    The very first issue I opened on mdserver – my server project that serves HTML from markdown files – was that the title of the page (which shows in the browser tab, and is used for browser bookmarks) needed to be set inside the markdown file, rather than generated from the file name. I didn’t…