Regular expressions are used for a variety of tasks but the one I see most often is input validation. Names, dates, numbers…we tend to use regular expressions for everything, even when we probably shouldn’t. The most common syntax for checking alphabetic…

When I wanted to refresh my React.js skills, I quickly moved to create a dashboard of cryptocurrencies, their prices, and and other aspects of digital value. Getting rolling with React.js is a breeze — create-react-app {name} and you’re off and running. Getting…

When experimenting with unicode property escapes, to identify accented letters in strings, it reminded me of a question I had a few years ago: what is the best way to identify and then replace emojis in a string? I first noticed this practice when using emojis…

I love JavaScript, it’s my favorite programming language, but I love dipping into other languages because they offer a new perspective on coding paradigms. There’ve been syntax additions to JavaScript that I’ve seen I found interesting (think ?? in optional…

The Promise API changed the game in JavaScript. We went from abusing setTimeouts and settling for synchronous operations to doing everything possible to leverage this new async API. Let’s check out a handful of awesome Promise API tricks! Cancel a fetch Request…

I really appreciate the amount of different <input> elements we’ve received over the past decade. These elements don’t just bring a new semantic advantage, but also provide UI helpers, which in many cases are useful. In a recent case, I found a UI element…

I hate slow websites. They are annoying to use and frustrating to work on. But what does it mean to be “slow”? It used to be waiting for document load. Then waiting for page ready. But with so many asynchronous patterns in use today, how do we even define…

One thing I love about JavaScript is that there are many ways to accomplish the same task, one such example being creating functions. There are several patterns for functions; one of the last you see used is the new Function method: /* new Function(arg1,…

Using the "git remote show REMOTE_REPO_NAME | grep 'HEAD branch' | cut -d' ' -f5" command provides you the default branch name for a given git repository.

A few years ago, I released a lightweight alternative to Bootstrap affectionately named Shoelace. Shoelace was small and fast because of its minimal design and pure CSS approach to styling. It used CSS custom properties extensively to enable customizations…

We can determine if an element has become sticky thanks to the IntersectionObserver API!

I used to have a personal aggregator of sites I enjoyed but maintaining it was a nightmare. I needed to grab each site’s RSS feed, categorize their contents, deal with errors and individual rate limits, etc. I had to tear the whole project down because it…

In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell…

JavaScript is full of tricks that you don’t know you want until you … want … them. Or maybe just until you see them. One trick I recently realized was conditionally adding attributes to React elements. Of course this trick essentially boils down to conditionally…

Every once in a while I get to a website that doesn’t allow me to paste into a form input. In most cases it’s something to do with login credentials (username and or password) and auth codes. So how are they preventing me from pasting information? It’s as…

One pattern in the JavaScript API world that web development veterans will notice is that we’ve been creating new methods to accomplish what older, grosser APIs once achieved. XMLHttpRequest became the fetch API, some APIs like Battery became async, and there…

There are numerous reasons to want to know which files have been added or modified in a git repository, one of which is your text editor highlighting those files. Another use case is running tasks against only files which are presently changed, like lint…

Earlier this month, David’s heartfelt posting about leaving Mozilla made the front page of Hacker News. Traffic increased by 800% to his already-busy website, which slowed and eventually failed under the pressure. Request Metrics monitors performance and…

Methods like Promise.all, Promise.allSettled, Promise.race, and the rest are really excellent for managing multiple Promises, allowing for our apps to embrace async and performance. There are times, however, that limiting the number of concurrent operations…

Every so often I discover a property in JavaScript objects that I didn’t know existed, oftentimes using another trick to accomplish the same functionality. One such property I just learned about was isConnected, a node property that attached to a context…