While working on a large project, it can be very useful to keep on eye on key metrics about your codebase to see how your project is growing and review indicators that could mean you’re building up maintenance issues / technical debt.
SonarQube
by SonarSource is a static analysis tool that supports 27 languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML & CSS and can detect a range of issues in your codebase including bugs, code smells and security issues as well as provide traditional code metrics like lines of code and cyclometric complexity.
SonarQube has several tiers available including a
Community Edition
which is free.
This article covers running the Community Edition up in a Docker container and analysing a project to see the range of information SonarQube can provide.
This article covers creating a new .NET 5 ASP.NET Core website in Visual Studio 2019 for Mac and running this website from both Visual Studio and from a Docker image.
Before we start, the following prerequisites need to be installed:
After recently seeing a few BEM class naming issues on a project I was working on, I looked for an online site that would check a CSS stylesheet for BEM naming issues.
I couldn’t find one… and what with being on lockdown here in England and having a fair amount of free time on my hands, I thought I’d write one!
Introducing the
BEM Class Names Checker
— An online tool to check a CSS stylesheet for common BEM naming issues.
BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) is a methodology for naming CSS styles in a modular and maintainable manner. If you’ve worked on large websites, I’m sure you’ll have come across indecipherable class names and felt the pain of changing a style in one place and that breaking the styling elsewhere on something that seemingly isn’t related. These are issues that BEM will help you to avoid.
In this article, we’re going to use the example of a product card to explain BEM.
Product card example
BEM relies solely on CSS class names to apply styles to HTML so there are no HTML tag or ID selectors. BEM class names can consist of 3 parts [block]__[element]--[modifier].
Over the years, I’ve worked on many large web app projects with developers of varying levels of experience and often see the same web accessibility issues crop up. In this article, I detail the 5 most common web accessibility issues I’ve come across and offer solutions for them.
Are you making / have you made these mistakes in your projects?
1) Using An Input Without An Associated Label
Wrong - Using plain text next to the input
Username <inputtype="text"name="username">
The text “Username” is not associated with the <input> so when a screen reader announces the <input>, it won’t announce that it’s for entering a username. The <input> will be announced along the lines of “input, edit text” so a screen reader user would have no idea what this <input> is for or what to enter.
The text “Username” also won’t act as a click / touch target to set focus to the <input>.
Knockout is a minimalist, mature and proven library for creating web applications.
It isn’t as feature rich as some of the more modern libraries & frameworks but it does what it does well, primarily being binding HTML elements against a data model.
Even in 2019, I believe Knockout has its place and is still used on some very large projects, including Microsoft’s Azure Portal.
TypeScript provides a huge amount of benefits over JavaScript including type safety, improved IDE tooling and additional constructs like interfaces and enums.
If you have an existing project that uses Knockout, you can move over to TypeScript now and start enjoying these benefits.
This article will start with covering using TypeScript and Knockout’s type definitions to create view models, components and bindings that are strongly typed.
We’ll then cover creating a new project from scratch that uses webpack and Babel to transpile TypeScript down to JavaScript (ES5).
This article covers how to start using TypeScript modules in an existing project alongside JavaScript modules.
If you have a large project, it may not be feasible to move to TypeScript all in one go.
Gradually migrating provides more flexibility and allows you to, for example, use TypeScript just for new code or “upgrade” modules when there are changes to existing code.
TypeScript provides some huge benefits like types support, better IDE tooling and additional constructs like interfaces and enums so why not start making use of these now.
When using Vuex with TypeScript, you typically use the @Getter decorator from the
binding helpers package vuex-class.
This is a more declarative approach over using this.$store.getters.*.
This article covers designing and developing a Weather App webpage using Responsive Web Design (RWD) techniques.
This article will cover creating wireframes for our page so we can visually see how the app will be laid out on different devices and then we’ll create some high-fidelity designs.
Next we’ll develop the responsive webpage making use of CSS media queries to alter the layout and design to fit any device screen size from a mobile phone to a large desktop.
This article covers creating a blog from scratch using the Node.js powered static site generator
Eleventy
(aka 11ty).
Eleventy is a relatively new project that came out in 2018 and is quickly gaining traction. It’s up to an impressive 5,000 stars on GitHub already.
Eleventy keeps things simple and as you’ll see, really enables you to quickly create a fully functional site.
The blog we’ll create will contain a homepage with excerpts from our posts that can be clicked on to read the full post. Once we have our blog up and running, adding new posts will be as simple as adding new Markdown files. Eleventy will take care of generating HTML pages seamlessly for us as well as updating the homepage.
