This week I was lucky enough to be part of the React Europe conference in Paris. I would like to write down some of the ideas that resonated with me. To do this I will focus on 3 big themes that seemed to come back in all of the talks. Context and Suspense Since React 16.3 Context and Suspense are two new features that will shape the architectures of client side React applications. Context is a feauture that has been around in the React API since quite a while. The use of it however has always been discouraged. A simple example that shows the power of it would be to show how we can simplify data fetching with it. [read more]

Porto Moniz, a quiet little town on the most north eastern end of the island Madeira. In this little town one of the famous levada trails on the island finds its head. The trail takes you along an amazing irrigation channel leading water from high up in the mountains through the valley down to the people in this little town. After my girlfriend and I completed the trail we hitchhiked back to the little town and stayed in the local youth hostel. The hostel found itself next to a charming little church with a little square and drinking fountain in front. Next to the church there was a cafe similar to those you would see everywhere on the island. They would all have a few men inside, and one in the doorway, each quietly stirring their espresso and staring to whoever that is coming by. [read more]

After exploring what the city of Brussel is exposing in its open data platform I decided to do something with the data on the Villo bikes. Villo is a local bike sharing system by the city that allows you to take out a bike at one bike station and leave it at another. The Brussels open data platform has an endpoint that gives a live feed of the availability of each of the bike stations all over the city. I thought it would be interesting to visualize over time how the bike stations are being used. Therefore I set up a task on Amazon AWS that makes a request every 5 minutes to get a status on the availabilities and stores them in a database. I let it run for the night during rush hour from 15h30 till 22h. [read more]

Intention The intention of this post is to sum up some thoughts on TypeScript that come from my own experience of working with it. As with all engineering the right tool for the job is always dependent on the context of the job. The context where I would consider using TypeScript would be on projects that have a large codebase that will be developed and maintained by a large team of developers that have preliminary JavaScript or TypeScript knowledge. The advantages that come with using TypeScript will in my opinion outweigh the effort that has to spend on set up and the large amounts of boiler plate code that has to be written compared to using JavaScript. When setting up a proof of concept or a rather small project JavaScript will do just fine for my needs. [read more]

This winter in December I took a little escape from work to the Cairngorms national park in Scotland. I had been curious about riding a fatbike for quite some time and after seeing “Mountain Bikes and Bothy Nights” by Alastair Humphreys, a great video about bothy culture I thought this would be the perfect area to do so. Other than that I Recently have been intrigued by steel bike frames. This for a couple of reasons. Steel bike frames are usually stiffer, tough heavier than aluminum frames. They are cheaper and more durable than carbon frames. And overall they just look cool. [read more]