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Matt Smith

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Modern Web Engineering, Front-End First

Stop turning everything into arrays (and do less work instead)

3 min read
12416 views

Most front-end code processes data long before it ever hits the screen. We fetch a list, tweak it, trim it down, and repeat. And usually without thinking too hard about how much work we’re doing along the way. For years, modern JavaScript has pushed us toward a familiar pattern: data...

  • JavaScript

React has changed, your Hooks should too

3 min read
9982 views

React Hooks have been around since 2018, but most codebases still use them the same way: a bit of useState, an overworked useEffect, and a lot of patterns that get copy-pasted without much thought. We’ve all been there. But Hooks were never meant to be a simple rewrite of lifecycle...

  • React

Error chaining in JavaScript: cleaner debugging with Error.cause

2 min read
5948 views

Error handling in JavaScript has always felt a bit chaotic. Throwing errors is easy, but tracing them back to the root cause? Not so much. That’s where the cause property comes in. The problem with traditional error handling When you’re working with layered code (e.g., services calling services, wrapper functions,...

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
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