Jonathan Martin

Eventually, your React web app will accept file uploads. JavaScript has exceptional APIs for handling chunks of binary data, but the interaction with React can cause some major performance hiccups. Discover the performance implications of 5 different ways to work with user-submitted binary data!

With React's stateless functional components you can create ambitious apps that are 98% plain ol' JavaScript. In this real-world example, we'll use functional programming and higher-order components to turn class-based React Components into stateless functional components.

You've probably heard statements like "JavaScript is a toy language, it doesn't support multithreading!" But in fact, JavaScript is tailor-made for concurrency. You'll need some patterns to write concurrent code that is performant and readable. Enter the Async IIFE.

Tech stack decisions can be hard. Is Node.js the right choice for your service? Have a seat and your server will be right with you.

You stumbled on this half-abandoned blog and figured I lost my login credentials. Well, yes… but actually, I've been blogging over at Big Nerd Ranch for the past few years. So if you

Now Playing: Learn to parse MP3 metadata with JavaScript’s ArrayBuffers, DataViews, TypedArrays and TextDecoder.

Many of the native mobile apps you love weren’t always native. Will a hybrid web app help you build a successful MVP or kill your startup?

Async generator functions have arrived in JavaScript! Iterate over Stream-like data with a for-loop and even rewrite ReactiveX.js. Read on to see what comes .next()…

Since JavaScript is unrelated to Java, many OOP patterns are not idiomatic to JavaScript. So how do you solve common OOP-like problems? It might be time to invite Functional Programming for lunch!

At the Ranch, we like to whip out Solr for handling complex searches. Unfortunately, Solr can make testing frustrating – it needs to be running in the background any time we run integration specs, but starting up Solr is slow. Is there a way to lazily load Solr only for the tests that need it?

It’s my third year working at Big Nerd Ranch as a developer and instructor. Inevitably, I have a lot of friends (and recruiters) asking me why I am still working here. It all boils down to two non-negotiable values—trust and kindness.

TL;DR: Checkout my new photography blog, it’s powered by Ghost! I’ve become strangely addicted to exploring and photographing new places these past 2 years as I traveled through Europe as

Last time, we covered web performance metrics for measuring a website's health. In this post, we continue down the rabbit hole of web optimization and the steps we took to improve our site's performance.

Developers geek out on numbers, designers labor over information visualization, and ops + marketing love upward trends. Web developers, too, love upward trends in web performance graphs, like time-to-first-load and info gleaned from Google Analytics.

Last time, we took a tour of TTYs and serial connections to shell into the Linux-powered Parrot Rolling Spider quadcopter. This time, we’ll telnet in over Bluetooth.

This year marks my second visit to JSConf’s paradisiacal backdrop on Amelia Island, and is particularly memorable—the talks demoed unusual applications and dazzled the imagination. But the swag item this year blows all the branded beach balls out of the beach water.

Don’t manage vendor assets with Rails gems; use Bower and NPM. Here’s a true story of how backend and frontend developers can work together.

What makes code simple? Fewer lines of code is great, but simplicity really depends more on the division of concepts in your codebase. Here's a quick case study of using Rails' new Concern module to "simplify" some duplication.

I know I know, it's been close to a month since I last blogged — that's because I've been working and feeling hobby-lazy on the weekends, and I'm still in the middle of writing

Once again, I found myself beating my way through a website todo, and again I painfully managed to complete the task. Perhaps I can spare you some of that pain with this discussion

After developing a number of Rails 3 apps, I've come to build up a list of "prerequisite" gems that I must install before I decide to include anything else. Without further

Another tip (err hurdle) I came across during the production of this blog — truncating an HTML string. Easy, right? It seems simple enough: shorten some basic text content from a long entry. It's

As a result of designing this blog, I've come to appreciate the refinement of Rails 3, and the drudgery of a few "less than perfect" spots. ActionMailer (now powered by the

During the process of coding my blog, I came across the need for a truncation feature (another post in and of itself). So I made a new file under the lib directory called