The blog of Seva Zaikov

I’ve been on a quest to get down from Electron’s abstraction layers to go as low as (reasonably) possible, and on Windows it ends with Win32.

In my previous article I explained how to read Table of Contents and raw track data from an audio CD.

I have a decently-sized audio CD collection, probably several hundred disks.

Before we can look at a typical building/packaging process of an Electron application, let’s take a more general overview at what does it mean to build and package any Desktop application.

A lot of desktop applications provide a multi-window experience.

Each desktop application can register a list of custom protocols it will handle.

You can use both Web notifications, the ones you can use in a regular web application executed in a browser context; and you can use native OS notifications.

There are 3 types of menus in a typical native application: Application menu Context menus (right click) Tray menu Let’s discuss each one of them.

Electron is a cross-platform framework which allows to develop Desktop applications.

As I mentioned in the Electron overview article, one of the key advantages of Electron is that you can wrap your existing web application, and likely, it will just work™.

React is a great library, and its core principle redefined how we approach UI applications on the Web: declarative components with a single render method that create exactly the same output as long as the state is the same (and it encouraged putting all s…

Notifications in Electron are provided through a native bridge (although you can use the Chromium web-browser ones, but they are more limited) so they feel more native to the platform.

React Context is a great API to avoid prop-drilling or if you need a simple way to have access to some global app data in any component, but don’t want to use often recommended solutions like Redux or Mobx, because they, being good scalable libraries, adv…

Redux is a great state management library which allows to centralize all your data in one place and subscribe to it in individual components.

Let’s talk about React performance.

JSX is a very popular choice nowadays for templating in various frameworks, not just in React (or JSX inspired templates).

Node.js is a pretty popular choice to build web servers, and has plenty of mature web frameworks, such as express, koa, hapijs.

Web is growing massively, JavaScript is being rapidly developed and improved, and to keep up, you need to transpile your code from the latest version to whatever (it is complicated, just trust us).

It is always a good idea to measure what you are doing and see the impact of changes, deciding on what to focus, and what to stop doing.

Doing a lot of frontend work using modern frameworks for single-page applications and some with backend in Node.js, Python and Go, I came to realization that traditional approaches (for example, MVC, or just rendering templates with provided data) are not…

One of the quirkiest parts of JavaScript is this keyword.

REPL stands for read-eval-print-loop, or just an interactive session (usually in your terminal), where you can enter some expression and immediately evaluate it, seeing the result.

This guide is focused on frontend developers – people who know JavaScript, but are not very proficient with Node yet.

We like to optimize for efficiency, and commonly used phrases are a perfect candidate for it – it takes less than a second, and you have a whole bunch of weird looking acronyms.

In software development it is very common to see two following extreme approaches to unit tests: 1.

I have complicated relationships with education.

This is the second part of the angular.js tutorial for seasoned developers.

We all follow best practices: we all look how successful companies do their business, how they structure their websites, how they organize their documentation.

Promises are to this point a very popular concept in JavaScript – they are native across all modern browsers, Node is switching to promises from callback style (there is even a way to convert callback style to promise style), but there are some small thin…

This is a high-level overview of Angular.js (or 1st version of Angular), targeted to experienced JavaScript developers, after which you’ll understand the concepts.

I have more articles about asynchronous javascript!

Sometimes you need to load something once, like a script, and you need to execute your code only after loading it.

I think we are at the moment when agile methodology is a de-facto standard in software development (at least in the web development).

Single-page applications are everywhere.

Reduce is a very powerful concept, coming from the functional programming (also known as fold), which allows to build any other iteration function – sum, product, map, filter and so on.

Recently I attended a very interesting meetup about static site generators – tools, which are usually used to generate static websites; the classic example is blogging, though they are capable of much more: docs, portfolios, etc.

Generators are a very powerful concept, but it is not used that often (see the twitter poll!).

Github pages allow you to host your static applications from their CDN.

In ES2015, new version of EcmaScript, standart of JavaScript, we got new asynchronous primitive Promise.

Git is a very powerful tool, but we usually use only couple of commands from it – git pull, git push, git checkout, git fetch and couple more, but we are often intimidated by not so common operations.

address.map(Function.prototype.call, String.prototype.trim); Recently my friend sent me a very interesting JS snippet, which he found in one open-source library: 1 addressParts.map(Function.prototype.call, String.prototype.trim); At first, I laughed and…

JavaScript was originally added to make possible simple animations and effects.

In early days of single-page applications, we used to hardcode a lot of stuff, and very often we ended up with a lot of chunks of code, which did not make a lot of sense outside of their page.

This article touches on the latest trends in CSS for big web applications (usually SPA).

Recently, I was in the process of finding a new job, and because my main expertise is javascript, all my applications required a test in frontend (usually in React.js) and Node.js.

What is a server-side rendering Server-side rendering (I’ll use SSR later for the sake of brevity) is a pretty recent term, it started its life just couple of years ago.

Recently I published Redux-tiles library, which itself is a pretty small library intended to fight the verbosity of original style Redux.

JS fatigue any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript This quote is not a joke, and JS community is growing in the outstanding pace (evil voices say that’s because of publishing very interesting repositorie…

Exciting New World Javascript goes on incredible pace.

Hidden complexity of npm’s dependencies Recently (already famous) yarn was published, which promises to solve all your problems related to the dependencies management, but while some oldfags don’t use it in production yet (what a shame!)