React

Last year, Apple announced that they would transition their entire Mac line from Intel processors to their ARM64 Apple Silicon chip called the M1. Several weeks ago, I started testing development on MacBook Air with the Apple M1 chip (pictured above).

React is a library that helps developers approach user interface (UI) development with the single-responsibility principle in mind, while building reusable, encapsulated components. But when it comes to styling, there is a heated debate in the React community. There are a few schools of thought:

One of the great patterns to come out of React 16.8 is composable hooks. Using React's built-in hooks such as useState and useEffect, we can encapsulate and modularize bits of functionality — almost the same way we create reusable components. In this article we're going to throw together a quick hook that registers an event listener on a keypress and performs an action. Nothing fancy, but it's a nice abstraction that makes it a lot easier to add some nice power-user features to your app.

Across industries and sectors, we have become accustomed to seeing great rivalries that drive further innovation and competition. In the early days of car manufacturing, we had Ford and Chevy. In the early days of beverage and bottling, we had Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And today in front-end software development, we have Vue and React. As a framework and a library, respectively, both single page applications (SPAs) are tackling Document Object Model (DOM) Manipulation in markedly improved ways from their predecessor JQuery; with the added benefit of offering state management and code-splitting up front. However, as Django developers, we often struggle to decide between these two titans when choosing a front-end for our Django REST Framework (DRF) APIs. In writing this blog post, we hope to alert you to some of the key distinctions between Vue and React, as well as some of their similarities, before you move forward with either for your team.

On July 27 - 28, we ran our quarterly ShipIt Day here at Caktus. These 24-hour sprints, which we’ve organized since 2012, allow Cakti to explore new projects that expand or increase their skill sets. The event kicked off at 3:00 pm on Thursday and we reconvened at 3:00 pm on Friday to showcase our progress. The goal is to experiment, take risks, and try something new.

Another quarter, another ShipIt Day! Take a look at what our team dove into in the first part of 2018.