Mar 8Polkadot Staking Experience: Representing the Stash and Controller AccountThis product is a work in progress, designed to communicate ideas, generate feedback, and define a solid foundation for application-side Polkadot. Opinionated vs Unopinionated Dapps The question of how opinionated a decentralised app should be plagues front end developers in an effort to find the right balance between usability and maintaining decentralised sources of…Polkadot4 min read
Feb 25Defining the Polkadot Staking Experience: Phase 0This product is a work in progress, designed to communicate ideas, generate feedback, and define a solid foundation for application-side Polkadot. Introduction This project lays down foundations and initial direction for a Polkadot front end application pathway, focusing on the Staking use case. Interface design has been considered in detail alongside…Polkadot5 min read
Jul 21, 2021MongoDB & Node.js: Writing Efficient Operations and AggregationsHow to handle common data aggregation tasks in MongoDB as data scales — MongoDB is the dominant database adopting the document data model in use today. Even Mongo’s homepage title states their solution is the most popular database for modern apps, and this is hard to argue against given the success of the database and surrounding ecosystem of tools that facilitate all stages…Java Script9 min read
Jul 7, 2021Google Play In App Purchase Validation in Node.jsHow to validate in-app purchases server side for Google Play apps — Introduction In-app purchase validation is a critical task that every app supporting purchases and subscription should implement as a means to prove the integrity of purchase tokens and transaction records. Validation can be used to validate a newly created transaction or validate a subscription to check it is still active. An…Nodejs8 min read
Jun 14, 2021In App Purchases and Subscriptions in React Native: 2021 WalkthroughHow to implement Expo In App Purchases and Subscriptions for iOS and Android — In-app purchases and subscriptions in 2021: Time for a change? After more than a year of using react-native-iap as my React Nativ e in-app purchase solution, I recently decided to migrate to expo-in-app-purchases to resolve a number of issues I was facing with the former package. It is evident from my development journey that expo-in-app-purchases is the better package to…Java Script15 min read
Jun 6, 2021React: How to Scale Theme Sets with Deep MergingCreate sets of themes and inject them as one object into React theme providers — Introduction In this article I will share a deep merging solution for adding sets of themes to your React apps. By deep merging multiple theme objects hosted in different files that adhere to a common theme structure, you can keep sets of themes separate and scale your theme capabilities with ease. …React8 min read
Mar 5, 2021TypeScript: Conditional Types ExplainedLearn what conditionals are and how they are used in TypeScript — Conditionals in TypeScript, also introduced in the TypeScript handbook, allow us to deterministically define types depending on what parameterised types consist of. The general basic rule is: type ConditionalType = T extends U ? X : Y If parameter T extends some type U, then assign X, otherwise assign Y. …Typescript10 min read
Feb 28, 2021TypeScript: Typing Dynamic Objects and Subsets with GenericsHow to use keyof, in, and extends keywords to type dynamic functions in TypeScript — TypeScript gained popularity over 2020 and is now in the upper bracket of the programming salary range. If you are a JavaScript developer you have most likely been exposed to TypeScript in some project you have worked on. This article, along with others surrounding it, will introduce the reader to…Typescript8 min read
Jan 30, 2021How to use Redux Persist in React NativeAutomatically persist and sync your Redux store on-device using Redux Persist — This piece introduces redux-persist, a package that automates the process of persisting state from your Redux store to local device storage, such as AsyncStorage in the case of React Native. redux-persist also repopulates your Redux store on subsequent app launches, otherwise known as rehydration. These useful utilities minimise the work…React Native12 min read
Dec 21, 2020React Native: How to Load and Play AudioWorking with audio clips in React Native and Expo AV — Expo AV: Reliable Native Audio Support This article introduces the expo-av package, a universal audio (playing and recording) and video module for React Native projects. The package is maintained by Expo, the go-to library for bootstrapping React Native projects targeting a range of platforms. Audio packages have come and gone in the React Native ecosystem, most…React Native12 min read
