Our Latest Insights
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.
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Say Hello to Kate Schaefer
September 12, 2019Our Formidable Denver office is growing! Please meet Kate Schaefer, a software engineer from Colorado.Progress Towards OSS Sustainability
August 28, 2019Open source sustainability has been an increasingly visible problem in recent years. The problem is too big for any one person, or any one company to solve, but at Formidable, we're hoping to make a very small, local dent by making open source work more sustainable for our business and for our engineers.Input Smoothing: An Intro To Reactive Animations
August 16, 2019A tutorial on how to make an input smoothing object from scratch and leverage it in a React component to smoothly animate a cursor.Glicky: A Graphical User Interface for JavaScript Development Workflows
June 18, 2019Modern web development is hard. Long gone are the days of opening up your text editor, writing some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, saving it to an index.html file, and loading it in your browser. For many of us, fiddling with package.json and interacting with the terminal seems easy, because we've done it for a long time. But do you remember how you felt the first time you were faced with a terminal?Meet Jon Reynolds
June 18, 2019We're launching a new blog series to showcase our talented team of Formidables across the globe. We're delighted to introduce you to Jon Reynolds from the Formidable Denver office.How To Create an Ideal Design to Dev Workflow
June 13, 2019Products that require both design and engineering find an inflection point in their lifecycle that can cause confusion, delay production, and add multiple headaches further down the road. Specifically stated, that point is when the thing that is designed must now be made. How can we, as both designers and developers, mitigate these risks and foster a more inclusive workflow that ensures the final designs are not only beautiful, but functional and developmentally sound?Jetpack: multiple engines for your Serverless packaging and more!
June 11, 2019The 'serverless-jetpack' plugin continues its mission to make Serverless Framework packaging and deployment rocket-fast with new features including parallel build workers, full monorepo support, and a dedicated packaging CLI.Placing Radium Into Maintenance Mode
June 4, 2019It has been more than four years since @vjeux proposed a revolutionary new idea for styling React components using javascript APIs. This CSS-in-JS talk sparked a wave of innovation in React open source community as we experimented with new ways to apply styles to our React components. Radium was one of the early tools to provide APIs for interop between JavaScript and DOM style tags, and allowed React developers to avoid specificity conflicts by scoping styles to DOM elements.Urql, Grown Up
May 31, 2019Early 2018 we released the first version of our minimalist GraphQL client `urql`. For the last year, we’ve been rethinking, rearchitecting, and rebuilding the core of the library, and a few months ago we silently launched `urql` v1.0. Today, with the release of the new documentation site, we’re happy to call `urql` a stable, production-ready GraphQL client library for both small and large React applications.Head-First into Open Source
May 30, 2019As more and more people enter the software industry each year, companies can benefit from learning how to bring out the best in their engineers. To that point, this is the story of how my team at Formidable and I quickly built something ambitious and valuable, without compromising my learning, support, and autonomy along the way.End-to-End Testing React Applications with Cypress
May 29, 2019When it comes to end-to-end testing React applications, Cypress is rapidly emerging as the community standard. While nothing about Cypress is React-specific, the design of its APIs pairs uniquely well with the nuances of React's reconciliation process and virtual DOM. In this post we'll dig into how Cypress works with React, focusing specifically on how it addresses the challenges of DOM-based testing and manipulation in the era of asynchronous web applications.Jetpack revisited: Even faster Serverless packaging and deploys
May 28, 2019After introducing the 'serverless-jetpack' plugin two weeks ago, we took the entire problem back to the drawing board and came up with an even faster and more robust method of packaging and deploying Serverless Framework applications.Game of Types: A Song of GraphQL and TypeScript
May 23, 2019Over the last few years, the popularity of both GraphQL and TypeScript has exploded in the web ecosystem—and for good reason: They help developers solve real problems encountered when building modern web applications. One of the primary benefits of both technologies is their strongly typed nature.CI/CD In a Build-free World
May 21, 2019Because of the build step and the increased complexity of our apps, Continuous Integration tools and processes have become an essential part of web development. But builds themselves are not why CI is valuable, they're just a side effect of the approach we as an industry have gravitated towards, and they have some drawbacks.