The Latest from Formidable
Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our unique Formidable culture.
Let the URL do the Talking, Part 1: The Pain of React Router in Redux
July 11, 2016“Just use React Router!” This is how most conversations about routing end in the React/Redux ecosystem. There’s no doubt that React Router is the standard-bearer for SPA routing in the React world, and there’s more to its success than its early arrival on the scene or its SEO...Radium Grid: A React Grid System Injected with the Power of Radium
June 20, 2016After spending my formative frontend years implementing layouts with the CSS grid systems from both Bootstrap and Foundation, I developed a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both. Later, grid systems like Jeet solved many of the pain points of the old grids: no more fixed-column...Why we chose MobX over Redux for Spectacle Editor
June 2, 2016For Spectacle Editor, our current collaboration with Plot.ly, we decided to use MobX to handle application state instead of Redux. Redux is an amazing framework, and here at Formidable we continue to use it on new and existing client projects with great results. In part, the decision to use MobX was...Announcing Spectacle Editor, a Work In Progress
May 24, 2016Spectacle Editor is a collaboration between Plotly and Formidable. The end result will be the first open source presentation tool with deep Plotly integration. Building on top of everyone’s favorite React slide show framework, Spectacle, we’re inviting the community to witness and participate in...Being Formidable
March 21, 2016Inside Formidable, we encourage collaboration and bold, well-researched ideas. Some ideas stick with you longer than others, and continue to inform you work, either directly or indirectly. Here are some that keep the creative fire burning for members of our team. The idea that creating things...React Inline Styles and the Future of CSS
February 29, 2016Writing and maintaining CSS for large applications (and large teams) can be challenging. Teams often have trouble with brittle selectors, naming collisions, specificity, and pile-ups of dead code. After seeing these issues first-hand on large projects, we built Radium: a JavaScript library for...Victory.js
February 15, 2016I’m not a designer. I’m a JavaScript developer. When I write CSS it takes me longer than it should, and often ends with someone more talented indulgently explaining how I could have avoided making such a mess of things. So, while I can literally do the thing, I can't claim to have design...Unit Testing React Native with Mocha and Enzyme
February 8, 2016Working in React Native has been an amazing experience. Coming from React, the workflow has been nearly frictionless. There has, however, been one question lingering: How the hell am I going to test this? Specifically, what is the best way to unit test my component logic? Testing JavaScript that...First Impressions with the Web's latest Presentation Tool: Spectacle
January 27, 2016Spectacle, if you haven’t seen it, is another in a long line of HTML presentation tools, but this one has rocketed into popularity (which isn’t exactly common for something like presentation tooling). Since I had heard it has a few neat tricks up its sleeve, and as a born and bred skeptic, I...The Only Correct Script Loader Ever Made
January 7, 2016A team here at Formidable was recently tasked with choosing a JavaScript loader in order to dynamically load scripts in the browser. After exhaustively testing every script loader we could think of, we found them all to fail in at least one way. With a complete test suite in hand, we set out to...Using React is a Business Decision, not a Technology Choice
December 4, 2015Preamble: React has become very popular among developers and there are lots of resources that speak to its technical merits. However, migrating to (or choosing) a new framework ultimately comes down to selling it to everybody at the table — including non-developers. There are very few...ReactJS and D3 Part I: Layouts
May 21, 2015I love D3 — it was one of the reason I became a developer. It introduced me to the concept of functional UI. And, given the direction of the Front-End ecosystem, re-rendering based on diffed arrays (if not diffing the resultant SVG) was clearly ahead of its time and part of the inspiration for...Inline Styles are the Future
March 1, 2015Radium is a set of tools to manage inline styles on React elements. It gives you powerful styling capabilities without CSS, and was built over about 2 months at Formidable Labs in response to our excitement about a talk by Christopher Chedeau (and, more broadly, the mindshifting way that Facebook is...Backbone.js with React Views
November 21, 2014On Nov. 18, 2014, I presented a talk on “Backbone.js with React Views” at the inaugural Seattle ReactJS Meetup. Backbone.js Backbone.js powers some of the largest web applications on the Internet and we use the framework extensively at Formidable Labs. It provides simple and flexible...
