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OpenRates Currency API (Sponsored)
30.5.2018
Creating your own APIs can be a total nightmare: worrying about uptime, load balancing, data accuracy, caching, and all of the other risks would keep me up at night. And if your API relates to money in any way? If you get that wrong you could be costing yourself, your employer, or your client...
How to Delete Untracked Files in a Mercurial Repository
29.5.2018
Working around Firefox at Mozilla means that you need to get acquainted with mercurial, the version control system that rivals git and svn. Like any tool, hg (mercurial) can be difficult until you’re well versed with it. And if you hg import a URL that doesn’t match up with...
Script & Style Show: Episode 10: Dojo
22.5.2018
In this episode: David and Todd welcome Dojo and JavaScript legend Dylan Schiemann and TypeScript and Dojo 2 superhero Nick Nisi. We cover the early days of Dojo, the road to 2.0, and what’s in Dojo 2.0 and beyond. Enjoy!
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Regain Disk Space from Homebrew
21.5.2018
One of my favorite utilities is Homebrew, the shell utility for installing and upgrading other utilities — it’s a lazy developer’s dream. Dreams can easily turn to nightmares, however, and I recently learned that Homebrew caches older versions of installed packages, leading...
Detect WebVR Support with JavaScript
16.5.2018
It’s been two years since I was heavily involved with WebVR at Mozilla but, despite not contributing every day, I can see VR making leaps and bounds, from Firefox making an increased effort to Chrome pushing VR and Oculus and HTC (Vive) improving their offerings. Native games are getting...
CDN, Web Security, and DDoS Protection from Incapsula (Sponsored)
16.5.2018
There used to be day that you could have a small to large website that didn’t require protection and worldwide CDN but, with how easy it is to initiate a DDoS attack and how important website speed is for search engine placement, it’s a given that you should look for a service to handle...
Get a React Component by DOM Node
15.5.2018
Retrieving a React component’s DOM node is fairly simple from within the component itself, but what if you want to work backward: retrieve a component’s instance by DOM node? This is a task that the old Dojo Toolkit’s Dijit framework allowed with the dojo.byId method, so it made...
How to Get a React Component’s Element
14.5.2018
JSX is an amazing pseudo-language for React, and if I’m honest, it’s what brought me to love React so much. Using React without JSX is cumbersome and frustrating, while using JSX is such an easier way to express your code. One drawback of JSX, however, is that it makes accessing...
Vertically Centering with Flexbox
8.5.2018
Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we’ve long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be. We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly inefficient —...
React and autofocus
7.5.2018
While I love ReactJS, I can say that I sometimes find interactions that were easy during the pre-ReactJS are annoyingly difficult or at least “indirect”. One example is properly ensuring that a given <input> element gets focused when a button in a different component...
Script & Style Show: Episode 9: What’s in the News
4.5.2018
In this episode: David reveals his tree-falling-into-house nightmare, but quickly moves onto recent news, like the massive release of Dojo 2, EU privacy, service workers landing in all major browsers (finally Edge!), this tweet, and more!  
The post Script & Style Show: Episode...
IP Geolocation with ipstack (Sponsored)
2.5.2018
Knowing where your web visitor is located is an incredible advantage to any website; you can show relative content like maps, pricing, and availability, output your content in their likely language, etc — I cannot overstate how useful that information is. Of course we have the HTML5...
Change Python Version
1.5.2018
Python plays a major role at Mozilla; much of our website backends and tooling are written in the powerful language. Want to build Firefox? You’ll need to make sure you have the proper Python version, which I recently found out had been upgraded. Despite installing and verifying I had...
Reset File Changes with git
25.4.2018
There are many different philosophies when it comes to code review but mine is fairly simple: I like receiving early “work in progress” patches, I like to be positive in my code review messages, and if a patch is 90% there, I like to finish the patch myself so the project...
DDoS Protection by Incapsula (Sponsored)
24.4.2018
DDoS protection is an incredibly important protection for sites that require dependability, regardless of the service your site provides. Whether your online product or service is for managing money, buying or selling crypto, or simply sharing your tech nerdery (like this blog), there’s...
Script & Style Show: Episode 8: Conferences
22.4.2018
On this episode: David turns carmudgeon when it comes to conferences. The crew talks about different conferences, pitfalls of going to a conference, and most importantly, how to be successful at a conference. Enjoy!
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Creating Spacers with Flexbox
18.4.2018
I was one of the biggest fans of flexbox before it hit but, due to being shuffled around at Mozilla, I never had the chance to use it in any practice project; thus, flexbox still seems like a bit of a mystery to me. This greatly pains me because I feel left out of the […]
The post Creating...
Script & Style Show: Episode 7: Open Source with Ashley Grant
14.4.2018
On this week’s episode we welcome Ashley Grant of Aurelia fame to talk about open source: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the scary. Enjoy!
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The Dark Side of Promises
9.4.2018
Since the release of es6 many new features have found their way into NodeJS, but non had quite the same impact as promises. Promises have been developed for the browser before es6 was even a thing. There were several implementations that have been used like jQuery’s deferred object before...
Script & Style Show: Episode 6: Debugging with Jason Laster
7.4.2018
On this week’s episode: we welcome my colleague Jason Laster from Mozilla to speak about the Firefox DevTools debugger. We talk debugging, console shame, the future of JavaScript debuggers, and more! Have ideas for the next episode? Comment below!
The post Script & Style Show: Episode...