Author: Mark Otto

Figuring out if you should use React Server Components

August 2, 2023 By Mark Otto 0

Understanding React Server Components — If you’ve struggled to get your head around the ideas involved with React Server Components, and Dan Abramov’s ‘let’s recreate RSCs from scratch’ went a little too deep, this is a good, high-level explanation of the fundamentals that explains what…

Exploring Fn::ForEach and Fn::FindInMap enhancements in AWS CloudFormation

August 1, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

AWS CloudFormation, an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service that lets you model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources, recently released a new language transform that enhances the core CloudFormation language. Today, we’ll be covering two more enhancements we’ve added since our initial release: Fn::FindInMap…

Opening up the Node.js toolbox

August 1, 2023 By Mark Otto 0

PythonMonkey: JavaScript/WASM Interop for Python — The alpha release of a new way to bring Python and JavaScript together, by way of embedding Mozilla SpiderMonkey into the Python VM. This post introduces the concept with some examples, an idea of where the project is headed,…

Name mangling

July 27, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Hono + Htmx + Cloudflare: A New Stack? — A lot of people seem to be jumping on htmx lately as an alternative to the complexity of frameworks like React, but what if you want to keep using JSX? Hono is a (vaguely Express-like) Web…

Dan Abramov to depart Meta

July 26, 2023 By Mark Otto 0

React Tweet: Vercel’s New Way to Embed Tweets in a React App — Are they even called “tweets” anymore? Nonetheless, Vercel has come up with an elegant way to embed posts from the site formerly known as Twitter that is faster and smaller than the…

The Node.js best practices list gets a 2023 update

July 25, 2023 By Mark Otto 0

The Node.js Best Practices List: 2023 Edition — A valuable, long standing resource has been “modernized to 2023 standards” (complete with recommendations of more modern libraries) with lots of work by creator Yoni and an ever growing team of contributors. The topics remain the same,…

How to write and execute integration tests for AWS CDK applications

July 21, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Automated integration testing validates system components and boosts confidence for new software releases. Performing integration tests on resources deployed to the AWS cloud enables the validation of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, service limits, application configuration, and runtime code. For developers that are…

The tale of how static typing came to JavaScript

July 20, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

TypeScript and the Dawn of Gradual Types — From GitHub’s ReadME project comes a thorough journalistic take on how static typing made it into the JavaScript world, what TypeScript offers, some alternative approaches, and the possibility of adding type annotations to JavaScript iself. Mike Melanson (GitHub)…