Getting Started with React Native

Learn more about React Native, how to get started with it and when the best time is to use this JavaScript framework for coding. Read more here. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Architecture Spotlight: Event Sourcing

What is event sourcing and how should you implement it? Your questions about event sourcing patterns are answered here. Click here to read more. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Why did we start TSConf?

Join the innovators of TypeScript at TSConf to learn more about advanced coding and best practices of this unique coding language. Learn more today. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 43: Tools We Love

Inspired by others sharing their favorite software and web development tools, we thought it would be great to get together and compare our notes. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

HalfStack Conference – Phoenix, January 2020

We are a team of enterprise software engineers determined to push the boundaries of coding & developing. Read our recap of the HalfStack Conference 2020 here. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript 53: Single Point of Failure

When developers submit code that isn’t up to snuff, it might not be for the reason you think. Helping developers feel capable and responsible is one step toward preventing a single point of failure. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

The Illusion That We Are Writing JavaScript

On this week's episode, we reminisce about a gentler time in which we would have a fun idea, create a new directory, and immediately start coding. To this end, Paul has started working on an open source web server environment, webserv, to handle some path mapping and CRUD operati … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Thanks for an amazing TSConf 2019!

To say that SitePen is a strong proponent of TypeScript is an understatement. We started down our TypeScript journey in 2013 after the 0.9 release. The JavaScript ecosystem was a very different place in 2013: ES6 was still a proposal in flux (no modules, classes, etc. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Next Generation Virtual Scrolling

Rendering large data sets in the browser while optimizing for performance and accessibility is a complex problem. The current approach to handling long lists of data is using an infinite scroll pattern to incrementally load and render data just before the data enters the view. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 47: Back Ends – SMS Browser, Streaming Audio and Game Engine

In the fourth episode of our 6-part series recorded at JSConf US 2019, the team interviews Alexandra Sunderland, Sara Fecadu, and Florian Rival around the theme of backend services. Alexandra started out writing a chatbot but it grew into a phone app that can browse the web witho … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 48: Growth – Imposter Syndrome, Helping JavaScript Newcomers

This fifth episode of our 6-part series from JSConf US 2019 features interviews with David Whittaker and Suzie Grange around the theme of growth. Go watch David's talk — it defines and deals with imposter syndrome quickly and without judgment in a way that illustrates it's not th … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 49: Beyond JavaScript – Time Zones, Gesture Recognition

Our final episode from JSConf US features interviews with Daniel Cousineau and Charlie Gerard around the theme of using JavaScript beyond the typical web site. Daniel's talk pulled back the curtain on the problems inherent in using timezones that can't be fixed just by using a li … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 46: Access – Libraries, Braille

In the third episode of our 6-part series recorded at JSConf US 2019, the team chats with Patricia Realini and Theodore Vorillas around the theme of access. Patricia pushed us to empathize with those who need to use libraries to access online necessities. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Podcast Episode 45: Declaration – CSS, Music, Components

Our second episode in the 6-part series from JSConf US 2019 features interviews with Lara Schenck, Adam Giese, and Luke Herrington around the theme of declarative code. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Getting Started with Electron, TypeScript, React and Webpack

If you need to build a desktop application today, Electron is an increasingly common choice. It is cross-platform and is built using the same web technologies that you probably already know. We're long-time users of Electron at SitePen, and have previously talked about Setting up … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 44: Episode 44: Community – Open-Source, Call for Proposals

In the first episode of our 6-part series from JSConf US 2019, we talk with Tierney Cyren and Peter Aitken around the theme of community. We chat with Tierney about how communities often grow best organically, almost by accident. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Giving Voice: Privilege, Storytelling

Members of the TalkScript team were onsite at NEJS Conf 2019 where we did a series of interviews with the conference speakers. We had a great time meeting these thought leaders and learning more about each of them and their talks. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Beyond JavaScript

Members of the TalkScript team were onsite at NEJS Conf 2019 where we did a series of interviews with the conference speakers. We had a great time meeting these thought leaders and learning more about each of them and their talks. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

WASM: Doing More Than Just Heating Up Your Computer

On this week's show, Bryan, Paul, and Nick chat with Karl Guertin about all things WebAssembly. They start with an introduction to what WASM is, it's history, and why it's useful over other technologies and plugins that have come before. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TalkScript Episode 38: Private vs. Private: Adding ES Private to TypeScript

We're joined this week by Max Heiber who is part of a team at Bloomberg implementing #private fields in TypeScript, Daniel Rosenwasser who is the program manager for the TypeScript team at Microsoft, and Ryan Cavanaugh who is a developer on the TypeScript team at Microsoft. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Using Progressive Enhancement to Design for Accessibility

The web is for everyone. That includes web apps built on web architecture. If you haven't heard the word accessibility mentioned in the last couple of years, you may have been living under a rock. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Using WebAssembly with Web Workers

When building web apps, writing processing intensive code can be a challenge. One issue is getting predictable running times across browsers and JavaScript engines that optimise different code paths differently, as well as producing code that doesn't interfere with user experienc … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Deploying a Dojo App with Docker

So you've built an amazing app using Dojo and now you are ready to go live. After a bit of research, you learn that traditional deployments are challenging! Luckily, the days of FTPing files are long gone, and we can rely on Docker for fast, reliable deployments. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Outside the Box – Outsourcing Your UX Design

Outsourcing is such a dirty word. Unbearable customer service, subpar manufacturing, and corporate downsizing all come to mind when you hear it. But outsourcing has gotten a bad rap. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

TypeScript Back Ends with Nest

In this episode, Bryan, Nick, Paul and Neil share their initial thoughts on the GitHub Package Registry. Then the gang dives deep into their experiences writing full stack TypeScript using Nest, an opinionated TypeScript framework for the back end. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Fail Privately: Onboarding Made Easy with TypeScript

This week Paul and Neil talk to new SitePen team members, Sam Menza and Eric Osmundson, about their experiences joining a remote company and how TypeScript helps accelerate the onboarding process. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Augmented Reality on the Web in 2019

Augmented Reality (AR) brings digital information or media and interweaves it with our experience of the real-world. In recent years Augmented Reality has become apparent in the consumer space in two major formats: head mounted displays such as the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magi … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 4 years ago

Getting Started with AssemblyScript

In a previous post we looked at how to compile the popular programming language Go to WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a new programming language which provides a compact binary format for the web. In this post we'll explore another WebAssembly target language called AssemblyScript. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Episode 31: What’s the Meta with Direct DOM Access?

Virtual DOMs are all the rage these days, and for good reason. But sometimes your application really does need access to the DOM. In this episode, we discuss Dojo’s meta concept and its powerful way of getting at DOM properties without breaking the abstraction and providing a sim … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Reasons Employees Prefer to Work Remotely

Remote working is becoming the norm across many industries, including technology. The industrial, one-size-fits-all, 9-to-5 desk job is becoming less and less appealing to the modern workforce. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Signs Your Product Has Outgrown Its UX: The European Cut

I found this really great shirt last week on the rack. I grabbed my size, tried it on, working each button down the front until it became painfully obvious: this wasn't made for me. After a little investigation, I found the fine print on the label which read European Cut. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Codemods: Effective, Automated Refactoring

Maintaining software is challenging. Stagnant software quickly becomes obsolete and this couldn’t be truer than in the JavaScript ecosystem. JavaScript firmly holds the reigns as the language of the web and with that comes a unique opportunity for the language and ecosystem to le … | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Compiling Go to WebAssembly

For many years there has been the only way to write client-side logic for the web; JavaScript. WebAssembly provides another way, as a low-level language similar to assembly, with a compact binary format. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Tab Overload: 5 Signs Your Product Has Outgrown Its UX

Do you have everything you need? You've probably been asked this a few times in your life. And if you were wearing cargo pants at the time, you definitely said yes in response. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Updating the Decorators Proposal for the Holidays

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash The Ecma TC39 committee, which standardizes the JavaScript language (officially known as ECMAScript), has been discussing a decorators proposal for several years. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

A Modern Terminal-Based Development Environment

VS Code gets a lot of love today, and rightly so, but there’s still something to be said for a text-mode, fully keyboard-controlled development environment. With tools like zsh, tmux, tsserver, and Vim, you’ll find you rarely need to reach over to the rodent on your desk. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

5 Signs Your Product Has Outgrown Its UX: The Little Black Dress

I don't wear a dress, but I've watched enough Project Runway to know why a little black dress is a staple to most wardrobes. Firstly, it's versatile. It's a quick solution to any kind of fashion ensemble, elegant or casual. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Cats vs. Dogs: Answering the Important Questions

SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference in London and Paul Shannon spoke at Phoenix TypeScript meetup. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

TC39 Binary AST Proposal to Improve JavaScript Performance

WebAssembly has grown in popularity due to its ability to improve application performance and support transpilation of source code in other languages into something that may get leveraged in a web browser. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Advanced TypeScript Concepts: Classes and Types

This article describes the features and functionality of TypeScript 3.1. While TypeScript is very simple to understand when performing basic tasks, having a deeper understanding of how its type system works is critical to unlocking advanced language functionality. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Does This Make My App Look Fat?

Just exactly how many clothes do you own? How many really? There's probably a few you wear all the time. Maybe some for special occasions. But let's talk about the clothes you don't wear. You know the ones. They just don't fit right. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

TypeScript Cheat Sheet

This cheat sheet is an adjunct to our Definitive TypeScript Guide and our ES6 and TypeScript for the enterprise developer workshops. Last updated for: TypeScript 2. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Update: The Definitive TypeScript Guide

This article describes the features and functionality of TypeScript 3.1. One of the most interesting languages for large-scale application development is Microsoft’s TypeScript. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

The Return of SharedArrayBuffers and Atomics

A common complaint of modern web apps is the concept of jank; web pages being unresponsive to user input and frame rates being low. Left unmitigated, this problem leads to a poor quality experience for end users of our web applications. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Programmatically Create Images with the CSS Paint API – Blog – SitePen

The CSS Paint API is a modern web platform feature to programmatically create images in JavaScript which are rendered to the page when referenced by CSS. You create images using the Canvas API, an API with which you may already be familiar. You can reference image URLs in CSS. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago

Web Components in 2018

For many front-end developers, components have become a central concept in their development workflow. Components provide a robust model for architecting and scaling complex applications, allowing for composition from smaller and simpler encapsulated parts. | Continue reading


@sitepen.com | 5 years ago