In TypeScript, imagine you have a situation where you have an object that could be one of several different types. How do you explain to TypeScript that the object you are working with is a specific type? Not very clear? OK. Let’s see some code, and then it will likely / hopefully make more sense. … Read more
I recently finished a really big refactoring from NextJS 13 to NextJS 14, mostly prompted by the server actions stuff, allowing me to entirely drop a publicly exposed GraphQL service, and do everything in backend Postgres. That all worked wonderfully. Very pleased with that – any time I can delete stuff and yet maintain the … Read more
I recently had to do a proof of concept site using NextJS 14. I hadn’t used NextJS since version 11, and who knew how much could change in 3 major versions? The big change is the use of Server Actions, and then the App Router / /app directory, as opposed to the older client server … Read more
In this post we are going to cover the Post Redirect Get pattern using NodeJS, Express, TypeScript, and for rendering things, Nunjucks and the Gov UK front end. This pattern is generic to any MVC implementation, and the concepts are very easily adapted. The Post Redirect Get pattern is for handling form submissions in web … Read more
There’s something super irritating to me about seeing a Jest test suite run and a bunch of noisy console logs get dumped out, mucking up the results. Here’s an example: At a glance, I find it’s pretty hard to know which of those tests is problematic. Even with the coloured console output, the big expected … Read more
I was reviewing some TypeScript code this afternoon that had a type assertion (as) (also commonly called a ‘cast’) in there that could have been avoided by using a Type Guard. Type Guards are one of my favourite features of TypeScript. That makes me sound like a real nerd. But hey, I might convince you … Read more
You know the drill: leave the office for the day on Wednesday, everything works. Open the laptop Thursday morning, errors everywhere. No? It can’t just be me… surely. Well, today’s issue was when I ran my Jest tests, all of a sudden I started to see this: And this kinda tells you what is wrong. … Read more
In a bid to save you time, I’m going to give you the conclusion I came to after spending several hours both at work, and after work, researching this issue. Do not export enum … from .d.ts files. Enums are runtime values and putting them inside .d.ts files means they will very likely be ignored … Read more
Of all the hooks available in React, useReducer is easily my favourite. It’s nice to be able to solve simple problems with useState, but in component’s with even a smaller amount of complexity than can be solved with a boolean state value, I tend to favour useReducer. Let’s dig in, see some examples, and find … Read more
In this post I will show you a way to create a unit tested React component that allows you to pass either a plain string, or one or more <p>text goes here</p> tags, and then render out only the first X words. When the word limit is hit, a ‘Show More’ button will display, and … Read more