Latest Blog Posts

• Adding Material UI in a Browser Extension Content Page

  Building great UI elements are hard, and after working in the front end space for so long, I’ve come to appreciate component libraries that let you get up and running at lightning speed. So of course, I have come to realise and appreciate how steadfast and solid the Material UI library is. Granted, not everyone likes the design of Material UI out of the box, but the ability to not have to integrate and merge stylesheets from disparate tools is quite freeing.

  Aug 14, 2023 Read more...

• Getting ESBuild to Watch for TailwindCSS Content Files for esbuild-sass-plugin

  I have a love-hate relationship with ESBuild. Sometimes, when working with it, it makes me want to bang my head against the wall in annoyance. This is one such occasion. Background At my $DAY_JOB , I work with the Logflare codebase, and do a lot of feature development. This codebase is in Elixir, Node.JS with a healthy dose of React. A mish-mash of SASS and TailwindCSS is used for styling, and many customizations has led to us writing our own build script to leverage ESBuild.

  Jul 3, 2023 Read more...

• How to Generate Dynamic Pages for Docusaurus

  Generating pages dynamically instead of relying on a 1-1 relationship of files to web pages seems to be an often overlooked aspect of static site generators, and Docusaurus is no exception. However, with some prowess and tinkering with the plugin system, we can definitely make the “impossible” possible, and generate pages from whatever data source we want. Interested? Read on… :::info This post is written for v2.4 ::: The Plugin Lifecycle To understand the flow of how pages are generated, we need to understand that Docusaurus and all of its core functionality is a collection of plugins.

  Jun 25, 2023 Read more...

• Using supabase-js Auth Features on Node.js

  Supabase Auth features are like a God’s gift from heaven for having a record-speed authentication system ready to go for your side projects whenever you need. However, since @supabase/supabase-js up to v2 (at time of writing) is meant for JAMstack developers, it does take some additional configuration to use it for the Node.js environment. You will need to some additional configuration: // ANON_KEY and ANON_URL are string constants from your project createClient(ANON_URL, ANON_KEY, { auth: { persistSession: false, autoRefreshToken: false }, }) This will disable attempts by the client to store and refresh session, as there is no localStorage in server/scripting environments.

  Apr 25, 2023 Read more...

• Taking Control of the Browser Dark Mode with Ant Design and TailwindCSS for Dark Mode Wizardry

  Everyone loves a well executed dark mode, me included. I think that having a full blast of white light in the middle of the night should be considered as bad as a slap in the face — you’re most definitely awake after getting it. Hence, for the sake of my side project’s future users and their night owl eyesight, I’ve recently implemented user controlled dark mode. Fundamentally, if you want to leave it up to the system and stop the user from custmoizing their theme, we can just use the (prefers-color-scheme: dark) match media and call it a day.

  Mar 25, 2023 Read more...

• Combining TailwindCSS with Ant Design for Super Fast (And Simple) UI Development

  I really enjoy developing with Ant Design. Yes, I know that it is a rather enterprise-y component library to work with when developing UIs in React, but I think that it has one of the fastest time-to-value as compared to any other component library, due to the sheer. In this blog post, I will give you a quick walkthrough of how to combine the two tools together, and also give some opinionated tips on working with them.

  Mar 19, 2023 Read more...

• NetlifyCMS is Dead - Can You Trust Netlify for Open Source?

  Dum dum dum…another one bites the dust! Another massively used JavaScript project can now rest in peace, alongside the thousands of other popular yet dead and unmaintained open-source JavaScript projects. However, why this death is sort-of important is because of NetlifyCMS' namesake and the main backer of this open-source project: Netlify. How do we know that NetlifyCMS is well and truly dead? It is very very obvious. Look at the stats yourself.

  Jan 5, 2023 Read more...

• Zn Reviews: Race for the Galaxy

  On today’s edition of Zn Reviews, we’ve got the classic euro board game, Race for the Galaxy! First released in 2007, this old soul of a game ranks 7.8 on BoardGameGeek and with a weight rating of 2.99/5. This means that it isn’t the most beginner friendly board game and isn’t really something that you should bust out when you are first introducing people to board games. Despite the high rating on BoardGameGeek, I have a love-hate relationship with this game.

  Sep 11, 2022 Read more...