In this article, I’m going to introduce you to a React testing tool named Jest, along with the popular library Enzyme, which is designed to test React components. I’ll introduce you to Jest testing techniques, including: running tests, testing React components, snapshot testing, and mocking. If you are new to testing and wondering how to get started, you will find this tutorial helpful because we will start with an introduction to testing.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/practical-guide-testing-react-applications-jest/

As much as I’ve always loved the experience of going out to eat and ordering in takeout, it’s very rare that I enjoy visiting a restaurant’s website. But I get it. The restaurant industry tends to run on very slim profit margins, so it’s hard to justify spending money on a professionally designed website when all they want it to do is list their hours of operation and menu.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/web-designers-help-restaurants-digital-experiences/

SWR is a lightweight library created by Vercel (formerly ZEIT) that allows fetching, caching, or refetching data in realtime using React Hooks. It’s built with React Suspense which lets your components “wait” for something before they can render, including data. SWR ships also with great features such as dependent fetching, focus on revalidation, scroll position recovery, and so on. It’s also a very powerful tool since it’s backend agnostic and has good support for TypeScript.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/introduction-swr-react-hooks-remote-data-fetching/

The entire Smashing team has been doing its very best to bring you live sessions with real experts — people with practical experience who love to share what they have learned throughout their careers. We organized Smashing Meets on three days — events that were open to everyone in the web community. With sessions on performance, CSS, GraphQL, and creative courage, we made sure to leave plenty of time for Q&A, networking, competitions and prizes.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/monthly-roundup-06-2020/

There’s no escaping the ancient masters. Their shadows loom large over philosophy, literature, architecture, warfare, and… web design? Believe it or not, yes. Although Plato infamously omitted CSS Grid from from the final draft of The Republic, there is nonetheless plenty the old heads can teach us about web development. Today’s lecture is about architecture, and how some of its core tenets apply to the worldwide web. Architectural terms are not unusual in web development, and for good reason.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/vitruvius-web-design/

I’ve seen a lot of confusion online regarding Web development with Flutter and, often, it’s sadly for the wrong reasons. Specifically, people sometimes confuse it with the older Web-based mobile (and desktop) cross-platform frameworks, which basically were just Web pages running within browsers running within a wrapper app. That was truly cross-platform in the sense that the interfaces were the same anyway because you only had access to the interfaces normally accessible on the Web.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/common-cross-platform-issues-flutter/

One of my favorite quotes about software testing is from the Flutter documentation. It says: “How can you ensure that your app continues to work as you add more features or change existing functionality? By writing tests.” On that note, this last part of the Mirage JS Deep Dive series will focus on using Mirage to test your JavaScript front-end application. Note: This article assumes a Cypress environment. Cypress is a testing framework for UI testing.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/mirage-javascript-cypress-ui-testing/

As a React developer, you should be already familiar with the principle that state should not be mutated directly. You might be wondering what that means (most of us had that confusion when we started out). This tutorial will do justice to that: you will understand what immutable state is and the need for it. You’ll also learn how to use Immer to work with immutable state and the benefits of using it.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/better-reducers-with-immer/

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? I spoke to Mina Markham to find out. Show Notes Mina Markham on Twitter Mina’s personal website Weekly Update From Static Sites To End User JAMstack Apps With FaunaDB by Bryan Robinson Is Your Website Stressing Out Visitors? by Suzanna Scacca Mirage JS Deep Dive: Understanding Timing, Response And Passthrough (Part 3) by Kelvin Omereshone Building A Facial Recognition Web Application With React by Adeneye David Abiodun Internationalization In Vue With The Vue I18n Plugin by Timi Omoyeni Transcript Drew McLellan: She is a front-end architect, conference speaker and organizer, and lover of design systems.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/smashing-podcast-episode-18/

With us all suddenly working from home in the COVID era, most of us have had to make some quick choices from a huge variety of video conferencing and collaboration tools. But do all of these apps work well for everyone? If you have a co-worker or a student with a disability, would they be able to participate as well? If you’ve had a disability yourself — or if you work in government or higher education — you’ve probably faced this question already.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/accessible-video-conferencing-tools/

Building applications for people from different parts of the world comes with challenges like support for multiple locales and how to integrate it into your application. I remember the first time I faced this challenge, I had to build an application that was going to have multiple languages (English, Yoruba, and French). This was the first time I ever wondered how applications that supported multiple languages were built and also how I discovered “Internationalization”.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/internationalization-vue-i18n/

If you are going to build a facial recognition web app, this article will introduce you to an easy way of integrating such. In this article, we will take a look at the Face Detection model and Predict API for our face recognition web app with React. What Is Facial Recognition And Why Is It Important? Facial recognition is a technology that involves classifying and recognizing human faces, mostly by mapping individual facial features and recording the unique ratio mathematically and storing the data as a face print.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/facial-recognition-web-application-react/

Mirage JS was built to give frontend developers the ability to simulate actual backend API calls. So far, we have seen how we can create records with Mirage, intercept API requests via route handlers and, last but not least, how the shape of the data returned to us from Mirage is affected. In this part of the series, we will see Mirage mechanism for simulating other aspects of an actual backend server like slow network, HTTP status code response, and also making requests to an actual backend even though Mirage is intercepting your frontend requests.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/mirage-javascript-timing-response-passthrough/

Stress is a nasty thing and many of us deal with it on a regular basis. Our jobs, school, homes, relationships, and even things going on around the world can trigger feelings of panic, unease, and depression. And those are just chronic stressors. Think about the small things that send your body into instant fight-or-flight mode on a daily basis (e.g. traffic jams, unhelpful customer service reps, getting sick when you have a big project due).

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/website-stressing-out-visitors/

The JAMstack has proven itself to be one of the top ways of producing content-driven sites, but it’s also a great place to house applications, as well. If you’ve been using the JAMstack for your performant websites, the demos in this article will help you extend those philosophies to applications as well. When using the JAMstack to build applications, you need a data service that fits into the most important aspects of the JAMstack philosophy:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/static-sites-jamstack-apps-faunadb/

An experienced interviewer takes care of many things: builds hypotheses, selects interviewees, composes invitations, schedules appointments, sets the stage, and, of course, writes an interview script. Any of these preparations can go wrong, but the script failure means all the effort is in vain. So, if you haven’t interviewed people a lot before or you have to delegate it to non-designers, I’d recommend paying attention to high-quality questions, in the first place.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/user-interview-questions/

Higher-order components (HOCs) in React were inspired by higher-order functions in JavaScript. A HOC is an advanced technique for reusing logic in React components. It is a pattern created out of React’s compositional nature. HOCs basically incorporate the don’t-repeat-yourself (DRY) principle of programming, which you’ve most likely come across at some point in your career as a software developer. It is one of the best-known principles of software development, and observing it is very important when building an application or writing code in general.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/higher-order-components-react/

This is the second of two articles on the topic of how digital accessibility is informed by equivalency. Previously, we have learned about the underlying biases that inform digital product creation, what isn’t an equivalent experience, the compounding effects of inaccessible design and code, and powerful motivating forces for doing better. In this article, I will discuss learning how to embrace an equivalent, inclusive mindset. I will also provide practical, robust ways to improve your websites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the people I interviewed.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/equivalent-experiences-part2/

Contributing to positive change is difficult, but it’s the right pursuit, no matter how much effort it takes. For years here at Smashing, we’ve been working with our dear authors and speakers, as well as students and professionals around the world, to share insights and practical techniques to work better and faster. We’re very much committed to that mission, and it’s always an incredible feeling to meet somebody who has read one of our articles, or attended one of our workshops, who still remembers their experience as that one little step that helped progress their career as a result.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/black-lives-matter/

Most of us are reasonably comfortable with the idea of carrying out usability testing on a website or prototype. We don’t always get the opportunity, but most people accept that it is a good idea. However, when it comes to a design concept, opinion is more divided. Some designers feel it undermines their role, a view that seems to be somewhat backed up by the famous “Forty Shades of Blue” episode, where Google tested which one of forty shades of blue to use for link color.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/06/test-design-concept-effectiveness/