React Hooks are a very powerful tool to add interactivity and features to user interfaces. As your application grows, you will increasingly rely on hooks, composing simple ones into complex hooks, and, before you know it, end up with an unreadable, unmaintainable mess that rerenders 5 times a second for no apparent reason. In this article, I will show you some React Hooks antipatterns and how to avoid them if you want a clean, readable, and robust application.
read more “Getting Out of Hook Hell: You Are Using React Hooks The Wrong Way”Month: June 2023
Easy Configuration Management in Django Projects
Setting up the settings module in Django can be cumbersome for beginners. This module holds many properties that are vital to your application, and a minor error may be fatal. Moreover, you need to keep track of separate environments, such as local, dev, test, staging, production, and so on. In this short article, I will show you my approach to handling different environments in Django projects.
read more “Easy Configuration Management in Django Projects”How to write a simple math interpreter in Python
Not long ago, I had to write a certain feature for my project. It involved parsing a mathematical expression from plaintext and evaluating it. This feature had to work with basic numerical expressions like 2 + 3, support context to use variables: apples + 2 * oranges, and parentheses: (2 + 3) - apples.
The obvious (and least appropriate) solution was to use eval. This standard function takes a string and runs it, treating it like Python code. This is considered to be very unsafe: eval an execute arbitrary code, which makes it a potential security risk, especially if the input comes from untrusted sources. Malicious users could inject harmful code that could lead to unintended consequences, such as executing system commands or accessing sensitive information.
In this article, I will walk you through my safe and extensible implementation using Python’s ast module.
Server Components in React: Exploring the Next Generation of Server-Side Rendering
React started its way in 2013 as a simple UI library, suitable for developing simple client-side web apps. It had evolved since then into a huge ecosystem of frameworks and communities. Many features were added as time passed, and one most notable is server-side rendering (SSR) in the form of NextJS and the like. However, this is about to change as React gets native support for server-side rendering in the form of Server Components.
read more “Server Components in React: Exploring the Next Generation of Server-Side Rendering”