Chris Stakutis CTO Concord Software and Executive Consulting chris.stakutis@concordsoftwareandexecutiveconsulting.com Executive Summary   Very short summation: We are moving rapidly to a “services” economy which will mean lower wages, fewer roles, and less-educated jobs. The upside is that family, property improvements, personal transportation and in-home cooking will dramatically increase in value.   What’s driving this is largely the enormous “work from home” movement and this will  not rebound–it’s here to stay, forever forward. This was a direction ahead of C19, but C19 cata ..read more

The funny thing about writing is that is is not like they taught you in high school. No. It’s about emotion and effect and reaching someone else’s feelings.  Isn’t that interesting? I was staunch-taught in strict writing…but that’s not the world. I like this style better and I’ll work on it. Sadly this story is true. I hope she/they are ok, but I think not. —- I saw something semi touching last night.  I stare out my window at the parking lot and Chateau.  I see a mini van pull in.  Out jumps a young mother (35?) And grabs one of those hotel trolleys and returns to her car ..read more

How many of you have suffered – literally suffered – from standing in long checkout lines at Shaw’s or other supermarkets.  Your children are cranky, your back hurts, your patience is at its breaking point – yet you wait and wait and wait. Your stress level is causing your face to redden and develop a major headache.  Just walking into the store knowing the endless line causes anxiety. Suddenly, self-checkout appears – management believes the under 50 crowd will love it.  Surprize !!!!! I was in the store the day after the checkouts were installed —- the over 60 crowd loved them —- with a few ..read more

Technology has finally concentrated on the elderly – Thank God!  As a caregiver to both parents for over 20 years – manually checking blood pressure, lungs, heart rate, respiration, and blood sugars was exhausting for my parents and myself.  Congestive Heart Failure is a monitoring nightmare for the caregiver. Observing changes in walking and balance along with the fear of hearing the dreaded fall was an exercise in anxiety. There were few technological devices to help or affordable.   According to Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Technologies “Our generation is about to be overwhelmed with ..read more

I’ve recently become an expert in Cypress (largely e2e testing, and for me/us largely ala React).  It is fantastic, and combines all the right techniques you know and love. I’ve spent years in Jest/Jasmine and other test/frameworks, and they lack so much.  But the reality is that testing front-end/GUI is just HARD!  It’s not like unit testing.  Its not like system testing.  Trust me, I’ve tested HUGE parallel processing shared-memory systems and it was easier — in such you owned timing and controls, in GUI, lesss-so. But Cypress is king and the simplicity is huge and the THOUGHT about you! How ..read more

Too much confusion and far too complicated data-sharing use-cases cause many React developers to become more discouraged concerning how to share data between React components and classes while preserving one-flow direction and asynchronous updates to the UI often from server-side changes or companion components.  Even talented React developers do not truly understand ‘state’, ‘hooks’, ‘context’, and how best to utilize such tools for simple data sharing. Worse, Redux makes a difficult concept nearly impossible to understand and code-copying abounds lowering code robustness. Complexity becomes ..read more

Both have a positive association on cognitive abilities such as executive function, short term memory, reasoning, global cognitive function, processing speed and recall. In older adults these skills can stimulate several cognitive abilities, brain plasticity and  possibly reduce MCI (mild cognitive impairment).   Knitting can lower heart rate and blood pressure and reduce harmful blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol.  Knitting has also been associated with helping people cope with health crises and improving reading, comprehension,  and math skills (think sweater patterns). A recent stu ..read more

This is interesting/weird.  The following code does NOT work: const [refresh, setRefresh] = useState(10); useEffect(() => { setInterval(() => { console.log(“Timeout, refresh:”, refresh); setRefresh(refresh + 3); }, 1000); return list.unsubscribe; }, []); What happens is that each time the timer-interval goes off, the value of ‘refresh’ is still at 10. Why? The value goes ..read more

  I ran into a new challenge when I was refactoring and organizing code and components into smaller reusable pieces.  I ran into a case where HOC-like approaches wont work, but perhaps an Inheritance model will, and settled on a much different approach. Let’s discuss the use case.  Imagine your server holds a list of People records.  You create your basic React “list” component to show perhaps just the last names.  This component might be used in a few places in your app so it is nice that it is reusable The component does the expected Comm ..read more

I heard the most amazing story about Napoleon. Apparently he instructed his aides to hold on to his mail for as long as three weeks before opening any of it. Why? Because he knew that most problems resolve themselves if he didn’t knee jerk and over-react to them. So by waiting until he knew about the issues, he was able to avoid worrying about and spending time on things that would distract him from what was truly important. There’s a common matrix called the Eisenhower Matrix using the axes of important/not important, and urgent/non urgent ..read more