Leveraging Your Tools
The tools we use today, and the patterns they are built upon are the results of decades of work and countless lessons learned. But we often ignore these lessons and build around them. Lets leverage Apollo Client to it's fullest!
Simple Git Stats
I wanted to see a quick graph of a larger project I was working on for a retrospective, I wrote a quick script to do it. Hopefully it's useful to someone else.
Git More, Achieve More
Committing more often can speed up your development and improve your workflow, build your applications incrementally and keep track of your progress.
Updating a Gorgon
I made some updates to Gorgon.js, allowing you to add hooks into the caching system allowing for a larger plugin space.
Using native HTML dialogs in React
HTML now offers dialogs and popovers, how can we use this native functionallity in React?
You don't need a CMS
When you are going to build a website, you're going need a way to manage content, so you need a CMS right?
Using S3 to pipe data to disk
When downloading large files from S3 and you want to store them to disk first and you want to use typescript.
A javascript library to simplify caching data
I have maintained a small npm library medusa.js for years, and it's time to make it more modern.
A super simple and limited markdown React component
When you want to give your users a little bit of customizability with some text, but not so much that they break your website.
Logging Slow Queries in Apollo GraphQL
How do you track down your slow apollo graph queries locally, well you can pay for apollo studio, or you can just make your own plugin.
Simple static site self-hosting for Astro with Caddy
I always prefer hosting my own projects on a simple server myself as that tends to be both cheap and flexible. And with Astro now bieng my static site generator of choice, lets go over how to host your site with TLS/SSL, a custom domain, redirects and the flexibility that comes with your own server.
Procedurally Generated Avatars - @mikevalstar/gridavatar
I needed some procedurally generated images for the header of this site, and some avatars for a project I'm working on so I created deterministic image generator with a neat pattern instead of relying on one of the placeholder image sites or something like gravatar
A Fresh Start
It's been a few years, and my older blog has been neglected and the contents old and crusty. Lets get a fresh start going again!