August 3, 2016 — Recently, I’ve been working on an isomorphic React website. This website was developed using React, running on an Express server. Everything was going well, but I still wasn’t satisfied with a load-blocking CSS bundle. So, I started to think about options for how to … Read More…

June 22, 2016 — Task runners are the heroes (or villains, depending on your point of view) that quietly toil behind most web and mobile applications. Task runners provide value through the automation of numerous development tasks such as concatenating files, spinning up development servers … Read More…

March 8, 2016 — If you’ve ever worked in an agile environment, chances are you’ve had your share of “retrospectives” — meetings where people write what made them “glad,” “mad” or “sad” onto different-colored notes, post them onto a board, arrange them in groups and — most importantly — talk … Read More…

March 2, 2016 — Web applications are everywhere. There is no official definition, but we’ve made the distinction: web applications are highly interactive, dynamic and performant, while websites are informational and less transient. This very rough categorization provides us with a starting … Read More…

January 19, 2016 — Node.js brought about a great revolution for JavaScript developers by allowing us to write code that runs directly on our machines; our skills were no longer limited to browsers alone. At first, many of us simply saw this as a way to write our application servers without … Read More…

April 21, 2015 — Things often come full circle in software engineering. The web in particular started with servers delivering content down to the client. Recently, with the creation of modern web frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, we’ve seen a push to render on the client and only use a … Read More…

April 8, 2015 — Web scraping is the process of programmatically retrieving information from the Internet. As the volume of data on the web has increased, this practice has become increasingly widespread, and a number of powerful services have emerged to simplify it. Unfortunately, the … Read More…

May 22, 2014 — Node.js is a rapidly growing technology that has been overtaking the world of server-side programming with surprising speed. MongoDB is a technology that’s revolutionizing database usage. Together, the two tools are a potent combination, thanks to the fact that they both … Read More…

February 12, 2014 — In this article, we’ll go over the concepts and techniques required to build a command line tool using Node.js and PhantomJS. Building a command line tool enables you to automate a process that would otherwise take a lot longer. Read More…