This won’t be a technical article this time. It won’t deal with good practices, cultivating a professional mindset, or pointing out tricky aspects of our web developer daily life. Here, I will talk about hackathons.

For less experienced readers, a hackathon is an event in which several teams are made up to tackle a technical challenge. They face each other, and the first crew to achieve the goal and pass several tests or requisites wins. Formerly, the goal was to hack a system and therefore discover a potential breach. …

TRACKING

When developing a digital app (web or mobile), tracking your audience helps to understand the various use cases of your prospects/users.

However, it’s too often under-estimated and needs lots of corrections: lack of data, non-relevant pieces of information, …

This article is about tracking your users of course but it also introduces a disruptive way to get more information about their journey on your app. Indeed, with this new approach you will be able to make your tracking strategy extensive and provide more data. …

PERFORMANCE

When building a web application, we are always looking for the best performance in order not to impact user experience.

Among all the techniques to improve web performance of a website, lazy loading of images allows us to defer image retrieval. Indeed, according to the dimensions, the compression, and the quality of the images, it may impact the size of the bundle downloaded by the user’s device. Therefore, deferring these downloads offers several advantages:

• Bundle size reduced
• User experience improved (bundle is ready more quickly)
• Controlled data consumption (only the visible images are downloaded)

In this article, I will introduce an HTML attribute to lazy load images. To go further, I will show how to use this attribute in a wider application with the three main JavaScript frameworks: Angular, React, and Vue.js …

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

In the older ages of front end development, fetching data from Web APIs was a very boring process. Indeed, the data model was frozen, meaning that you faced one of these situations:

• The data model was too rich for your use case.
• Some pieces of data were missing.
• You needed to chain requests to get the expected data structure.

To overcome these situations (and ease front-end developer tasks), GraphQL was created. It provides a new way to fetch data from the back end. …

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

If you are part of a front-end team with several talents (including you), hundreds of commit might be pushed every day. Indeed, no matter the team methodology you use to deliver new features, each developer is working on a specific functionality.

In order to validate their changes, a developer should ask for a Merge Request (or Pull Request) to merge these changes into the common branch (the one used for reference). Other front-end developers will make a code review.

A code review is important for four reasons:

• You can check if the code fulfills the specifications.
• You are informed about the code modifications, which will potentially lead you to change your modifications on your active branch or suggest some enhancements. …

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Times have changed since the old days when an IT professional was this typical shy person wearing glasses and fascinated by computers, video games, and so on.

Computer science has become wider with much more complexity and several sub-domains: network infrastructure, web development, data science, IoT, etc.

Working as a team has also shifted and new methods have risen to the forefront: V cycle, Agile methods, or the good old continuous delivery. …

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Being a front-end developer is a versatile job. It involves a dozen tasks and abilities. In addition, it’s mandatory to keep the focus on the prime goal of what we are developing: a website helping people to ease their common tasks.

In this article, I am going to list the various aspects/features every web developer should consider. If they exist, I will provide some clues and examples regarding these features and how to succeed in them.

User Interface

Layout

Creating a web app starts with building an attractive and accurate layout that will attract the user and make them spend a lot of time on your website. …

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

I had been developing with Angular for more than two years. I discovered this JavaScript framework with its version 6. I enjoyed it for so many months, quarters, and years. But I abandoned it while the early coming version 9 and the Ivy renderer engine were released.

Moving from Angular to Vue.js has been a pleasant moment, a real enjoyment in my front-end developer life. The goal of this article is to explain to you why.

At the very beginning, I was a back-end developer, developing REST API web services for several companies. I loved this well-structured code, with meaningful instructions and a strong business logic. The purpose was real: to fetch data from the database, transform it, and provide complex objects in the form of web services so that front-end developers could use them. …