Recently, I’ve been working on a project called sapling.dev, which generates full stack JavaScript (node + React) apps, including full CRUD APIs, Auth0 and Stripe integrations, and more. Sapling is the first developer tool I’ve built, and I quickly realized that the following items would be critical as we begin…

Overview When your Express API receives HTTP requests, how do you check whether the request is valid? Especially for POST and PUT requests, where you expect the request body to contain an entire object to process, how do you know whether it has the right fields and valid values? In some…

ESLint, Prettier + VSCode — This is Part 2/2 in my series on setting up a minimal Node.js & Express project using Babel. Check out Part 1 here: A Minimal Node.js, Express, & Babel Setup Let’s set up a basic Node.js / Express.js API that uses Babel. Babel will ‘transpile’ our ES2015+ code and module…medium.com In Part 1, I set up Babel in a fresh Node / Express project, talked about Node versioning, set up scripts to use Babel for development and…

Let’s set up a basic Node.js / Express.js API that uses Babel. Babel will ‘transpile’ our ES2015+ code and module syntax to older-style code for compatibility purposes. I’ll use a basic Express API as the example, add in absolute imports via Babel, and briefly discuss whether we even need Babel…

Part 2 — In my last post I reviewed some of the basics on Client Side Rendering (CSR) vs. Server Side Rendering (SSR). Check that out here if you’re unfamiliar: Next.js SSR vs. SSG & Incrementalism Part 1medium.com Create React App was the example of a CSR app, and Next.js was the lead-in to the world of SSR. As noted, Next.js…

Part 1 — Recently, I’ve been working more with Next.js. Its ability to help you pre-render your site on the server is really powerful. Before diving into any of the specifics on Next.js and its methodologies on pre-rendering, let’s take a step back and discuss basic Client Side Rendering vs. Server Side Rendering…