Technical
Gnarly Learnings From June 2022
We love reading, watching, and listening to constantly update our skills and learn new perspectives. Here are some of the exciting pieces we learned from this month. Goodbye, useEffect In this talk, David Khorshid discusses the awkward undesirable aspects of using useEffect to handle side effects. Specifically, useEffect’s proclivity for entering infinite loops and React…
Read MoreMake Yourself Accessible: New Rails Apps
In Part 1 of this series, I talked through some of the ethical and moral rationales for making a website accessible to as many people as possible. It’s good for your users, and it’s good for your code, so it’s a good idea. But I didn’t actually lay out the process of adding accessibility checks…
Read MoreMake Yourself Accessible: Why It Matters
My grandfather used a wheelchair after suffering a spinal injury in his forties. His house had a long ramp and a tiny elevator, his pepper grinder was electric, and he slept on a waterbed (it was AWESOME). If he were using the modern Internet, he’d be using accessibility tech. He had mobility in his hands,…
Read MoreManaging Shopify App Extensions Across Environments
Recently, Shopify started requiring that any apps integrating with a Theme use Theme App Extensions. There is plenty of documentation related to getting started with Theme App Extensions, such as Shopify’s documentation, but there is very little information available regarding managing these extensions across dev, staging, and production environments. The challenge of managing extensions across…
Read MoreHotwired Modals
We can use Hotwire — specifically, Stimulus and Turbo — to create some modals that present a nice, dynamic user experience. And they can do this while staying in a mutli-page app structure that Rails is so good at. First off, we need to know that, with Turbo, you can load a page with a…
Read MoreLooking Forward in Mobile Development
TL;DR Very few businesses really need a mobile application. If you use Bluetooth or GPS, you know what you need. But for everyone else, whether you want a mobile app depends mostly on the experience you offer your users. Technology Marches On Mobile development, particular cross-platform (e.g. both iOS and Android), is at a much…
Read More10 Signs Your Custom Software is in Trouble
Does this sound like your company? Customer Support call volume has increased because users are having trouble navigating your website or app. Marketing is frustrated be the inability to make changes to customer-facing applications quickly and easily. Sales is frustrated by crashing or poorly performing demos. If you’re receiving complaints from customers and departments across…
Read MoreGnarly technology predictions for 2022
When we first started The Gnar Company I expected to spend a significant amount of time researching and implementing new technologies each year. What we’ve generally found is while new frameworks and stacks are constantly evolving, clients typically seek expertise and stability within a given tech ecosystem. In our 6 years of operating The Gnar…
Read MoreFigurative Literals: Sharpen your Strings
Recently, I decided to brush off an old project and tune it up with some modern day Typescript know-how. In my weeks-long dice-driven fugue state, I stumbled on some Typescript features that I hadn’t had a chance to use before, and I think they’re neat. This is the second article in the series – check…
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