My team and I are working on a React project that runs in regular browsers, and we recently decided to use Cypress for end to end testing. It has an actually surprisingly nice you can use to write describe-it style test scripts that will load up a browser with any page on your site, click some things, interact with the dom, and then even do assertions that your page renders correctly. You can do "cypress run" to run your tests via the command line or "cypress open" to start this little application from which you can run all tests or just specific tests, and it creates this little sidebar that gives you a history of the commands it's running and details about what happened when things have failed. Anyway, yes Cypress is awesome, but that's not what thing blog post was supposed to be about...

This is a short little post about choosing font colors when building software applications. In web development, if you don't specify a font color (ie the css property "color") then it will default to black, and black straight up #000000 black is really not a very good choice for a font color...

Although I was hired as the "AWS Lambda expert", I've been helping out on the frontend JavaScript side of things because, eh, they need it. Lol. In this post I'm going to describe the approach that I introduced at my current job which is working quite nicely...

When I'm designing a web application that I want to be responsive, I frequently use the units vh and vw (which stand for viewport  height and viewport width). These are great because they allow you to size things based on a percentage of the viewport height. However, sometimes you want things sized at 100% of the height or width minus a constant, and that's where the calc function comes in handy!

One of the things I really hate is when my application running in gulp serve looks totally different from the application running with gulp serve:dist. The second one does a production build and then runs that, and sometimes with the minification and concatenation things gets messed up (usually it's that dang css). Anyway, this post is about how I fixed the z-index issue that is related to this.