Glenn Stovall

Author Archives: Glenn Stovall

Moving Fast Without Breaking Things

Why is speed important? One of the most common recurring conversations I had with startup founders was how to get products and features out the door faster. Typically, all is running smoothly until it’s time to actually push your work out into the wild. People want to buy the poster that says “move fast and […]

Reading Articles Because You’re Bored, Huh?

When people ask me how work is going, my response is “the good kind of boring.” How so? No pressing deadlines. No sense of urgency. A tried-and-true tech stack. Feedback comes in, and I implement changes. I send code off for review and review others — Features ship. Bugs die. It’s not terrible. But, when […]

Test Clicks On Connected Components In Under 10 Lines of Code

Here’s a fairly benign component, that can give developers pause when its time to write unit tests for your components: There is only thing worth testing here: That when we click the button, the function we passed in as a prop gets called. That prop function could be a complex chain of actions & API […]

Write Redux Reducer Tests Fast

Redux may come with a lot of boilerplate, patterns, and libraries, but at its core it’s simple. A current state and an action go in, new state comes out. Just because the code is simple doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tested. If you are using Redux in your application, that means your store is a […]

How to Test Async Redux Thunks

In a previous post, you learned how to make HTTP requests inside your redux application. We use redux-thunk, a library that enables you to dispatch functions in addition to flux-style actions. With it, you can dispatch functions to handle more complex cases such as asynchronous operations. But then how do you test them? Testing can be more […]

How to Perform HTTP Requests with React & Redux

Async is one of the toughest problems in front-end development. It’s one of the reasons Redux and React were created. React all started when Facebook had what seemed like a trivial problem: Sometimes, the “unread messages” count in the header and the footer of the page would be different. This Skinner box is so important […]

Which version of JavaScript is “Vanilla JavaScript”?

There are so many different versions of JavaScript floating around, and browser support is always changing. How do you know which features you can use without transpiling or some kind of build step? Correct Answer: ES6 (a.k.a. ECMAS 2015) is supported in all major browsers. In April of 2017, all major browsers added support for […]

I Google Simple Functions Daily… Am I A Bad Developer?

“Help! I Landed A Job, And I Have No Idea What I’m Doing!” Do you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing… like you’re a fraud? Impostor syndrome is common in our industry. Wondering when you’ll “just know” something and not be so reliant on Google & Stack Overflow? That day never comes. Anxiety comes from […]

Why You Should NEVER Walk Out of A Job Interview

Have you ever had a disastrous interview experience? My worst: Three years out of college, working in web development, I was struggling with a linked list problem. The interviewer pauses, looks me in the eye, and says: “…are you sure you studied computer science in college?” spoiler alert: I didn’t get the job. Doing well in a […]

Choose Your Next Article Topic With This Exercise

When I fall out of my writing habit, most often it’s because I can’t decide what to write about. Choosing an article topic can be paralyzing. Here’s an exercise I use to come up with new topics. Afterward, the issue is not that I have too little to write about, but too much. When coding, […]

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