Based on my learning experience from the Google Developers Technical Writing pre-course
Whether it is writing documentation, an article, PR comments, or just answering a question on Stack Overflow, writing is an underrated part of being a programmer.
Google has a technical writing course on its developer website. This includes pre-class material which consists of reading and some practice questions.
I spent the weekend going through this material. Reading through this course material has brought awareness to some of the areas I struggle with when it comes to technical writing. I highly encourage all programmers to take some time to read through it as well.
The estimated time to complete it is…
How I changed my career and landed my first developer job
I’m happy to announce that I just started my new career as Software Engineer! I’m sharing my story in hopes to inspire others who are thinking to change their careers as well. Before I wrote my first line of code, I knew nothing about programming.
Before we dive into my story, let me share a little background about myself. I am a third-generation Japanese American who was born and raised in Hawaii. I moved to Japan 7 years ago as an English teacher. I spent 3.5 years working at an after-school program teaching English to kids. …
The best JavaScript calendar library out there
In a recent project, I wanted to create a calendar that had views for the month, week, and day. I searched the internet and tried a few libraries out. By far, the best option I found was FullCalendar.
FullCalendar is a calendar library that you can implement with vanilla JavaScript or a framework such as React, Vue, or Angular. They have over 300 settings, making the calendar highly customizable to suit your needs.
In this article, we will take a look at how to do the following:
- Implement FullCalendar in a React application
- Create a custom header with custom buttons
- …
And so can you!
Contributing to open source has been on my to-do list for a long time. Since I started learning code, I heard that contributing to an open-source project is a great way to learn and give back to the community.
For over a year, I watched videos on YouTube about open source and looked for projects I can contribute to. However, I never got to the point where I actually made a contribution.
Until now.
I’m happy to say that I just added my first contribution to an open-source project. …
An introduction to the tools I used and a reflection on the things I learned
I recently updated my portfolio website!
My previous portfolio was built with WordPress and hosted on Bluehost. I built it when I was still pretty new to coding, so I thought it was time to give it an upgrade. This time, I decided to build it using Next.js and host it on Vercel.
I wanted to focus on improving the performance and also add a more modern design. I don’t have much sense for design, so I went with something simple. Check it out below!
In this article, I will introduce you to the tools I used to build my…
Send an email to yourself using SendGrid and Next.js API routes
It is always important to be able to communicate with users of a website. It may be potential clients who want to hire you or maybe just users who have feedback for you or want to leave you a nice comment.
There are different options you can take when it comes to communicating with users. You can try one of the following options:
- Write your email address for users to send you an email.
- Create a form to open up an email messenger.
- Create a form that sends data directly to your email.
In this article, we will look at…
End the struggle of trying to use Vim
If you are new to Git, I’m sure you may have run into this situation before. You run git add . then git commit but forget to add a commit message. Then all of a sudden you are brought to the following editor.
Build UI components in isolation and keep track of them with Storybook.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to see all of your UI components in one place? Imagine being able to build each component in isolation, then test them for hard-to-reach cases. That is exactly what Storybook is used for.
What is Storybook?
Storybook is an open source tool for building UI components and pages in isolation. It streamlines UI development, testing, and documentation.
Storybook allows you to create UI systems for your projects. You can use any of your favorite JavaScript frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular, or many more.
In this article, we will take a look at…
An introduction to Day.js with examples of useful functions
Dealing with dates and times in JavaScript is famously challenging. That’s why a library like Moment.js has almost 15 million weekly downloads on npm.
However, if you check the documentation of Moment.js, you will see that even they recommend some alternatives when it comes to modern development. One of the issues with Moment.js is the bundle size. If you need internationalization or time zone support, the bundle size can get quite large.
One alternative is the Day.js package, which is only 2kb.
Day.js is a minimalist JavaScript library that parses, validates, manipulates, and displays dates and times for modern browsers…
Display a placeholder preview of the content before the data is loaded
Spinners and loaders have been the traditional way to show that content is being loaded. However, in order to improve the user experience, skeletons are being used more in modern development.
What is a skeleton? A skeleton is a UI component that displays a placeholder preview of your content before the data is loaded. Skeletons offer a better user experience by reducing loading-time frustration. Instead of staring at a blank screen or spinner, the user will see a placeholder preview of the content to come.
In this article, we will learn the following:
- What is the skeleton component in Material-UI
- …
Chad Murobayashi
Software Engineer living in Tokyo, Japan. Born and raised in Hawaii.
