In the previous part of this tutorial I’ve discussed how to update application state using actions.

We’ve implemented a simple function that used state’s get and set methods to change the count variable.

Refactoring

In this post we’ll extend our previous counter example by refactoring it a little bit.

Let’s recall how the main controller looked before:

In the previous post we’ve seen how to create a simple counter application using Cerebral.

Now let’s start introducing some fun stuff.

First up - Debugger

Just like you have Devtools in Redux, you have a similar tool in Cerebral.

It’s supplied with the main cerebral package and in order to use it, you need to add the following code to your controller:

I want to preface this post with the following disclaimer: I am not a fan of Redux. It became a de-facto standard in state management of React apps and seems to be working great for a lot of people, but I find it to be very verbose and hard to work with. Ok. Now that it’s out of the way, let’s see what else exists in the world today that can help us maintain our application state and keep our sanity.

There is a new tool that I’ve added to my blogging toolbox and it’s called Forestry. It’s a pretty nifty idea - keep creating your site using Hugo or Jekyll static generators and keep it nice, fast and tidy and safe from PHP problems of Worpress and friends, but add another layer - a CMS. This CMS is a very light one. It’s aware of the static generators, it can read your site’s existing structure without a hickup and you can connect it to your Git repository to integrated into your existing workflow.

At work we are using Microsoft Teams and on-premises Team Foundation Server. I thought it would be nice to receive notifications from the failed CI builds into the channel on Teams, but unfortunally there was no such feature in TFS, so I decided to whip one up using Webhooks. Here’s how you can do the same. Step 1 Near your channel name in Teams, press the three dots ‘…’ and click ‘Connectors’.

While prototyping a frontend application I came across an amazing project that I wanted to share. It’s called service-mocker and what it does is - by applying some neat request hooking magic, allows you to write a backend prototype of your server in a ExpressJS-like syntax, right inside your frontend application. What is even neater - they are employing service workers (obviously working only on modern browsers) which allows you to see the requests to your fake/mock backend inside the Network request panel!

I was looking for a free hosting solution for my small SPA experiments, the blog and a landing page. I’ve experimented with zeithq now.sh , Google’s firebase.com and Surge and each had their issues. Now.sh - doesn’t allow custom domains on free plan. Shows source code, have to re-alias on each deploy, performance was surprisingly bad (considering they describe their service as having SPDY HTTP/2 support, CDN and auto scaling) Firebase - can only host one app on a domain, otherwise - SSL breaks and you cannot use it anymore.

This is my n-th attempt at a blog. I’ll try to collect coding tips I come accross and possibly some random ramblings I need to get off my chest. Enjoy.