April 2022: React Table Made Easier and a New IoT Video: "Blues, Where's My Car?"
"The Niedringhaus Effect" returns to Blues Wireless TV, as I walk through how to build an anti-theft asset tracker in under an hour.
Hey there,
I don’t know about you, but I’m surprised it’s already the end of April - how are we already over a third of the way through 2022?
Time flies when you’re staying busy I suppose, and I can certainly look back over the last 30 days and see plenty that’s worth sharing. I hope you’re ready for some React content, some IoT videos, and even a dash of API testing tools for good measure.
Last month, I shared a post on how to build an anti-theft tracker for under $100. This month, a new installment of the “The Niedringhaus Effect” dropped detailing how I built it and you can too.
Link to blog post and video: “Anti-Theft GPS Tracker and Recovery System”
Inspired by how many high value things are out there that aren’t supposed to move (think statues, commercial equipment in storage, or environmental monitors), I built an anti-theft tracker using just a few pieces of Blues Wireless hardware and some handy integrations with Twilio and Google Maps.
(Full disclosure: I work for Blues Wireless as a software engineer.)
I also joined Fernando Doglio on his podcast 20minJS to talk about state management in React today.
State management continues to be a hot button issue in the React ecosystem, and in this bite-sized podcast (every episode is just 20 minutes like the name says!) we hit highlights like:
Best and worst state management practices,
Prop drilling,
Third party state management libraries,
Is Redux still relevant,
And my general advice on building React apps.
And to round the month out, I published two blog posts: one’s all about how to customize complex data with the popular React Table library, and the second compares two big API testing tools: Postman and Insomnia.
A few months back, I built a dashboard to display some of the IoT data being generated by devices in the real world, including data tables showing a list of all the events generating data for the charts and maps in the dashboard.
The dashboard’s built with the Next.js framework and I chose to go with the headless React Table library so I could customize the look and feel of the table easily.
It’s a great library, but it was a bit of a challenge when I wanted to take two or more pieces of data and combine them into one column or run some sort of formatting function on the data before displaying it in a table cell, so I wrote a blog post showing how to do these things.
Likewise, I’ve had the opportunity to use both API testing tools Postman and Insomnia, and they’re both excellent tools. To help people just getting into the API testing game, I wrote an article sharing the pros and cons of each so you can choose the one that best suits your needs. Hopefully you find it useful.
P.S. Here’s what the finished IoT dashboard looks like as well, in case you’re curious.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes”. Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of May,
- Paige