Recent articles

In modern React, there are many ways to style a React application with CSS. Whenever I do a React workshop with aspiring React developers, I show only one of these ways due to the limited time I have for the complete React workshop. But often this one way of styling isn't enough to cover the full scope of this important topic. There are many…

Node + Express + MongoDB is a powerful tech stack for backend applications to offer CRUD operations. It gives you everything to expose an API (Express routes), to add business logic (Express middleware and logic within Express routes), and to use real data with a database (MongoDB). It's perfect for establishing a MERN (MongoDB, Express, React…

Eventually every Node.js project running with Express.js as web application will need a database. Since most server applications are stateless, in order to scale them horizontally with multiple server instances, there is no way to persist data without another third-party (e.g. database). That's why it is fine to develop an initial application with…

This is a tutorial for setting up MongoDB on MacOS. You might be wondering why there's a need for another setup guide for MongoDB in the first place, since there are a few across the web. I found many tutorials and guides on how to set it up, but found most of them to be unclear and outdated, based on old MongoDB versions. The checklist is not…

Using React ref and really understanding it are two different pair of shoes. To be honest, I am not sure if I understand everything correctly to this date, because it's not as often used as state or side-effects in React and because its API did change quite often in React's past. In this React Ref tutorial, I want to give you a step by step…

This is a tutorial for setting up PostgreSQL on MacOS. You might be wondering why there's a need for another setup guide for Postgres in the first place, since there are a few across the web. I found many tutorials and guides on how to set it up, but found most of them to be unclear and outdated, based on old PostgreSQL versions. The checklist is…

An Express application is most often used as a backend application in a client-server architecture whereas the client could be written in React.js or another popular frontend solution and the server could be written in Express. Both entities result in a client-server architecture (frontend and backend relationship) whereas the backend would be…

Express.js is the most popular choice when it comes to building web applications with Node.js. However, when saying web applications with Node.js, it's often not for anything visible in the browser (excluding server-side rendering of a frontend application). Instead, Express.js, a web application framework for Node.js, enables you to build server…

I have always been of the understanding there are no common sense rules about how to create a minimal Node.js application with Babel. In my search for these answers, it seemed that every tutorial I came across showed something different. As a result, I wanted to streamline this project setup for my readers and myself, so I developed a common…