Using the react-mailchimp-form package to capture and connect with your users.
Hoping to send newsletters to connect with your audience? Maybe your application has user signup functionality and you have a great database of emails. In this case there are ways to take advantage of that database and use this column to create your contact list directly. Maybe your application does’t require user signup and you’re not capturing those that come to your site. In either case, It’s beneficial to have a quick, easy way to form a contact list and stay connected to potential or existing customers. Let’s let Mailchimp do our heavy lifting.
Whether you want to send out an email newsletter with updates, a link to your most recent blog post, special offers, information or even advice, with Mailchimp’s free account, you have the option to send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. Let’s walk through the process of setting up a signup form on your application so you can capture all these valuable visitors and turn them into your network (or even customers!). …
3 weeks ago, I began researching how the Web works, and was sidetracked by the Internet and the multitude of acronyms and terms used when talking about both.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the most basic response to ‘How does the web work?’ is that the web is a series of data exchanges that include requests from clients (aka: browsers) and responses from servers. Clients can be any of your devices that are connected to the internet. Servers, which are also connected to the internet, are the hardware that store files of applications, programs, websites, etc. …
With a general understanding of the Internet, and before we dive into the Web, there’s so much terminology surrounding it all.
I’m pretty antsy about getting to how the Web works, but I’d like to first go over a list of terms and abbreviations that you’re likely to see throughout my block of articles on the Internet and the Web, and, more importantly, that are used in all other sites that document the workflow of these processes. (These will be alphabetized so as not to get the hierarchy or chain of order incorrect.) …
But by accident I googled ‘How Does The Internet work?” and ended up learning some pretty cool stuff. Blog 1 of 2
It can be hard to admit when we don’t know things, but I think if we can be honest about the gaps in our knowledge, it’s the best opportunity we have to open up and to learn. I’ve found, lately, that when I openly say I don’t understand or I don’t know something, other people around me end up saying that they don’t know either. Last month another junior engineer in search of work mentioned that during an interview he was asked how the web, from a developers standpoint works. He did not do as well as he would have liked with the answer, and I’m telling you right now, my immediate thought was, ‘oh no, I have no idea’. …
Managing Side-Effects in Functional Components
In React class components, we have lifecycle methods available to us. The best way I have heard lifecycle methods described is what happens to a React component from its birth to its death² (if you haven’t heard of Mosh Hamedani before, check him out, especially his ‘What Is Javascript’ tutorials on Youtube). As we move from class components to functional components, we still need to handle side effects of a component in the stages of it’s ‘life’ (updating the DOM, clearing the Dom, fetching data from an API endpoint, etc), but methods like componentDidMount, componentWillUnmount, and componentDidUpdate become unavailable to us. …
The next thing I remember, I was participating in a Hackathon…
I recently was skimming through my LinkedIn feed and remember one of my connections had written a blog about how she had attended her first Hackathon. She mentioned that although she had been in programming for a little while, now, she never felt smart enough or that she was a strong enough developer to participate in one. She ended up attending the recent MLH Hackathon, TechTogether New York. I had signed up to attend this event, also, even though I couldn’t relate to her more. Who was I kidding, I thought. I could NEVER offer anything to a team and I would do nothing but flail miserably! Then the strangest thing happened…before I even had a chance to flake on that Hackathon, I ended up in a completely different event, without knowing what had happened. Enter GitHub’s FLOSS and Code 2020 Hackathon. …
Functional components can have state, too!
What is a Hook? A Hook is a special function that lets you “hook into” React features.¹
Ever gotten halfway or more through a Functional component or had to jump back into coding a component from days ago and thought…’Urghhh! I need this component to actually have state!’ What you thought had been stateless and perfect now needed to use a lifecycle method like componentDidMount or componentDidUpdate (these methods can be achieved with the useEffect hook…that hook’s for another blog), but going back and changing how you were rendering or maybe you’ve called props a number of places and…oh man, now you need to go back and change the entire component to be a Class component. A silent ‘noooo!’ …
Flexing New Design Skills
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) determine how HTML elements will be displayed on the screen. Most elements are either displayed as a block or inline. Elements like div, header, footer, main, h1….h6, p tags, etc. are block elements. These elements will have whitespace above and below them, and will not have elements next to them in either direction. Block elements start on new lines and take up the full width of either the page (if they are the parent element) or of the container that they are wrapped by. Elements like strong, span, a tags, img tags, etc. are inline elements. Inline elements will be displayed inside a block, and can start anywhere in a line, for example next to other inline elements. …
React App w/ Rails Backend API — Hosted on Heroku
I built a small app last week for a technical interview. The build includes a ReactJS frontend that makes API fetch requests to a RapidAPI address, as well a Ruby on Rails backend to store upvotes and downvotes to a PostgreSQL database.
I initially tried to have the backend hosted on Heroku with the front end deployed through GitHub Pages (using a gh-pages branch). I still haven’t figured out why I was never able to get my GitHub deployed app to show anything but the ReadMe.md file…so after the day trying, reverted to hosting the frontend on Heroku, as well. These steps should get you up and running pretty quickly. Follow any steps necessary to make sure both of your apps are connected to separate git repositories. You’ll also need to have previously connected your Heroku account to your local environment. …
Wrapping Up Our Last 3 Growth Notations
Big O Notation is such an immense topic to learn and understand. I read an article that said ‘you don’t have to be a math genius to understand it’. They were lying. Writing these articles, though, has helped me get a better grasp on the subject and just this past week while in an algorithm meetup, I had my first AH-HA moment when someone asked me it was possible to develop the algorithm with an O(1)…before I even knew what was happening…I spouted out “No, because we will always need to iterate over the entirety of the elements, the best we can even hope for is an O(n).” …
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