Bad CSS in JS

An article, posted more than 5 years ago filed in css, react, style, javascript, standards, simple, simplicity, npm, packages & coffeeandorange.

I tried to understand the argument made for styled components vs. ‘traditional’ CSS. But when reviewing these arguments I found out that they typically use bad code as proof for their point.

See e.g. the following SCSS code:

$blue = #5DBCD2;

@mixin button-styles($bg-color, $color) {
  background: $bg-color;
  color: $color;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 0.20em;
  &:hover{
      background: darken($bg-color, 6%);
      cursor: pointer;
  }
}

.button {
  @include button-styles(#ddd, black)
}

.button--primary {
  @include button-styles($blue, white)
}

To pair with a simple component along the lines of:

const Buttons = props => (
  
    Default
    Primary
  
)
export default Buttons

The suggested alternative is:

import themeVars from "myTheme"
import styled from "styled-components"
import { darken } from "polished"

const B...

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Getting started with Cypress - a modern frontend testing framework

An article, posted about 6 years ago filed in ci, testing, frontend, ui, gui, javascript, npm, yarn & selenium.

Cypress is a new, open source integration test runner for modern JS applications (its development is sponsored by their online dashboard that allows you to record test-runs). It doesn’t require setting up Selenium, or other browser plugin, manually. Add it to your package.json and everything you need will be set up:

npm install cypress --save-dev

You can open even a GUI using:

./node_modules/.bin/cypress open

Alternatively, you can run the tests headless using the run command:

./node_modules/.bin/cypress run

Running the test will leave you with video recordings of what has been happening visually on the frontend for further review.

Ok. All nice, but you're right, these are tests running against a locally run server. So let's move the examples directory out of scope of the test runner:

mv cypress/integration/examples cypress/integration-examples

*(when exploring a new framework, I typically like …

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Really concise guide to package.json scripts

An article, posted about 6 years ago filed in yarn, npm, package, javascript, development & scripts.

Being unable to find a really concise description at a stable endpoint, the "scripts"-section of package.json, central to node/npm/yarn/euh. JavaScript-development these days, here it is.

The package.json is a json file which typically contains things like version and name of a project, the typical metadata. It also contains the dependencies of a project. But this is about the scripts-section. Completely optional, but so convenient that typically your project has one already:

{
  "name": "hello world",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
  }
}

The "scripts"-section contains snippets of code that you typically run using npm or yarn:

So let's say you're typing git add . && git commit -m "wip" && git push a lot (totally not recommended), you could do:

{
  "name": "hello world",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "wipitup": "git add . && ...

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