Companies ask me to take care of technical interviews from time to time. Having done quite a lot of these interviews, I learned a lot from them. By helping out a lot of different clients, I also have been on the other side of the table more than a few times too. This means I have learned some patterns on how to create a positive impression towards my interviewer, and I know how to estimate the candidate as well. I don’t like to ask for technical assessments because I value the time of the candidate, and I’d like to think of them as people, not programming machines. That being said, I do unders ..read more

Sometimes forms in Angular can be a pain, and some of us have been struggling with them since the beta phases of Angular2. First there was only the template driven forms approach, and then later on the Angular core team introduced Reactive forms. Both solutions still exist today, but the community sold Reactive forms as a best practice and they basically told us to stay away from template driven forms. The reasoning behind this was: Reactive forms are easier to unit-test. Less chance of 2-way databinding on models directly. Reactive api’s like valueChanges and statusChanges returned observabl ..read more

The people that are used to read my articles will quickly realise that this is not the type of articles I generally write. Since I’m passionate about this subject, I’m going to write about it anyway. Bear with me, you might take away something from it. If not, at least you gave it a shot, right? I’m writing a book as we speak about my life and career as a software professional, not sure if I’ll ever publish it, but consider this a very slimmed down version of some chapters of that book. This article is about personal experiences in my life and career and can be bare, how I struggled with life ..read more

Using env.js files When we deploy our Angular application, chances are big that we will let our data-access layer connect to another api url than the one we connect to in development. This means that this api url should be configurable at some point. There are multiple ways of working with environment variables in Angular code-bases. I like to choose for a simple env.js file that can easily be replaced by the continuous integration (read this article). This way the env.js file is never really part of the build and can be replaced at all times. This file could look like this: // app-name/src ..read more

This article should be a rather short one. It’s about how we can create dialogs in Angular. Using dialogs in Angular can be tackled in complex ways but can be easy as well. When I started out with Angular I created this article. This is already 6 years ago at the time of writing this, and I believe there are better solutions now. Come to think of it… There already were. The dialog itself A dialog could be nothing more than a <div> with a position:fixed that contains a title and a body. We can use content-projection to pass a title and a body. @Input() properties might not be enough here ..read more

The why The people from builder.io have done an awesome job writing Qwik, and their arsenal of other great tools. I started playing with Qwik some time ago and decided to rewrite my website brecht.io in it. (I’m also planning to use Qwik in more complex apps, but I wanted to see my website in production first.) When I started reworking my website, there wasn’t a tool that took care of in-page SPA (single page application) routing — or at least not how I’m used to it from other client-side technologies. I’m used to working with SPA routing in AngularJS, Angular, and React, so I wanted to explor ..read more

Reactive dumb components When we write RxJS logic inside our presentation layer we mostly wind up with reactive flows inside our smart components (container components). The reasoning behind this, is quite easy: Because these smart components are the orchestration vessels of our application, they communicate with reactive asynchronous flows such as XHR-calls and state management, but also with events emitted by the dumb components. That being said, dumb components may also benefit from reactive flows. Especially when the dumb component has multiple @Input() properties that rely on different se ..read more

Covid These are challenging times… Harsh times for people and companies. Even for some companies it results in fatal decisions. Unfortunately we were impacted by COVID as well, as we haven’t earned a single dime since March 2020. If we take this painful aspect into consideration in combination with the fact that Kwinten is pursuing a new job at Stackblitz we decided to stop the legal entity StrongBrew VOF. StrongBrew VOF is no more… I (Brecht) personally want to thank Kwinten for this awesome adventure and I hope we can work together once again in the future. That being said… I will continue a ..read more

About this article When we create single-page-applications, there is no way around it. Sooner or later we are going to be facing state. There are a lot of solutions out there to manage that state and together with those solutions there are a lot of opinions. Especially when working with experienced developers, there opinions get stronger and often result in interesting discussions. This article is not about which libraries to use, but to learn about what state is and how we can reason about it. The examples are all written in Angular, however the approaches are not specific to Angular. In this ..read more

When writing Angular applications there are always pieces of functionality that are being rewritten over and over again. 3 common usecases are: Showing a loading status Showing an acting status (whether the user is adding, updating or removing data) Showing validation errors In this article we are going to implement a generic solution on how to fix these usecases. A non generic way of loading, saving and handling validation errors in Angular Before we jump to the solution, let’s have a look at the impact of a non generic way of handling the previous called functionalities. A solution that is ..read more