Kevin Ball
Practical Developer
Mountain View, CA, United States
Contact Kevin
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Kevin:
Friday Frontend: Thanksgiving 2018 Edition
Happy Thanksgiving to US readers, and happy Friday to all of you! I’m grateful ... → Read More
JavaScript Arrow Functions: How, Why, When (and WHEN NOT) to Use Them
One of the most heralded features in modern JavaScript is the introduction of arrow functions, sometimes called ‘fat arrow’ functions, utilizing the new token =>. These functions two major benefits —… → Read More
7 Frontend Architecture Lessons From Nuxt.js – codeburst
Front-end architecture is a hot topic, and for good reason. → Read More
Learning Web Development in 2018 – codeburst
I’ve been in the software industry since 2004, and it’s felt like drinking from a firehose the whole time. We’ve gone from manually setting up servers to spinning up entire clusters automatically in… → Read More
Building Wordpress Gutenberg Blocks with Vue.js – codeburst
Wordpress’s new Gutenberg editor is an extremely hot new topic in the web development world. With it, Wordpress is fully embracing React and modern JavaScript, bringing millions of developers into… → Read More
Understanding Higher-Order Components in React and Gutenberg
The front-end ecosystem has been evolving extremely rapidly, with the rise of frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular leading to dramatic changes in application architectures and a whole new set of… → Read More
How WebAssembly is Accelerating the Future of Web Development
This question has been on the lips of many a developer ever since WebAssembly (WASM) began to look like it might actually become a reality. While many have speculated that WebAssembly will mean the… → Read More
2018 Node.js User Survey Report Shows Continued Rapid Growth
On May 31st, 2018, the Node.js Foundation released its 2018 User Survey Report, with insights from more than 1600 participants, spanning 100+ countries. Usage continues to grow rapidly, with over ¾ of participants expecting to expand their use of Node.js in the next year, and significant improvements in ease of learning Node reported, as compared to the 2017 version of the report. → Read More
Transparent Wrapper Components in Vue – codeburst
In a current Vue project, I have a couple different components that are almost just native elements, but with a slight wrapper around them that adds functionality. Examples include a date input that… → Read More
The 80–20 Approach to Sustainable SCSS – codeburst
There’s been a ton of innovation in the CSS and SCSS worlds over the last few years. A multitude of new naming conventions, architectural choices, and advanced libraries to make your CSS more… → Read More
Microsoft Introduces Edge DevTools Protocol
With the April 30 release of Edge version 17, Microsoft has announced the availability of the Microsoft Edge DevTools Protocol, a set of JSON and JSON-RPC APIs that enable clients to interact with Microsoft Edge tabs. Following the model of the Chrome DevTools Protocol, the Edge DevTools Protocol enables independent developers to build tools that interact with Edge using standard web… → Read More
Why VueX Is The Perfect Interface Between Frontend and API
The increase in complexity in front end web development has driven to increasing amounts of specialization and separation of front and back end. This specialization and increased complexity has a… → Read More
Firefox Introduces Web Authentication API
With the Firefox 60 release on May 9, Firefox became the first major browser to support the Web Authentication API. This API enables users to avoid text-based passwords for websites and instead uses a local device with a biometric check or private PIN to generate a secure cryptographic identifier. Support for the API is in development for Chrome and Edge, and under consideration for Safari. → Read More
Learning React: Is This ES6 or React? – codeburst
In a recent blog post about his struggle to learn React, Brad Frost highlighted an issue that I’ve heard from developer after developer: Knowing what is what can help tremendously in figuring out… → Read More
Understanding the Spread Operator in JavaScript – codeburst
Newer versions of JavaScript have brought vast improvements to the language in terms of expressiveness and ease of development, but the rapid pace of change has left many developers feeling like… → Read More
Service Workers Now Supported across All Major Browsers
With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update released on April 30th, and the Safari 11.1 release on March 29, Edge and Safari join Firefox and Chrome in enabling Service Workers by default. Developers can now develop Progressive Web Apps providing offline functionality and expect them to function across all browsers except Internet Explorer and Opera Mini. → Read More
Creating Multi-root Vue.js Components – codeburst
A common constraint in component-based frameworks like Vue.js is that each component has to have a single root element. This means that everything in a particular component has to descend from a… → Read More
Twitter Passwords May Be Compromised, Could Be One of the Largest Data Breaches in History
On May 3 Twitter announced that they had uncovered and fixed a bug that had resulted in user’s passwords being stored in plaintext. No information has been released on how many users were affected, and all users are being recommended to change their passwords. If all users were in fact compromised, this would be the one of the largest known data breaches in history. → Read More
JS Foundation Announces Dojo 2.0 Release
On May 2, 2018 the Dojo team released version 2 of Dojo, a JavaScript toolkit. This complete rewrite of Dojo focuses on what's needed for a modern enterprise application. Dojo 2 is built with TypeScript and embraces a component-based architecture and virtual DOM. It includes a range of tooling improvements, including a CLI, integrated testing and utilities for connecting Dojo to popular… → Read More
Node.js 10.0 and NPM 6 Released with Emphasis on Security
On April 24 the Node.js project released version 10.0.0 of Node.js and npm, Inc released version 6.0 of npm. Both releases emphasized security improvements, with Node.js updating to OpenSSL version 1.1.0 and npm including new security-focused features such as the automatic alerting of insecure dependencies. The Node.js release also included a new native programming API and stable HTTP2 support. → Read More