January 2022: New React Hooks Videos & Build Your Own Next.js Asset Tracking Dashboard
Use Docker in Java apps? You'll definitely want to read this post that gives you all the Docker power without needing to be a Docker expert.
Hi everyone,
I hope your 2022 is off to a good start. For those of us in the US, it’s been chilly. I’m lucky enough to be far enough south to miss most of the snow fall, but even in Georgia we’ve had quite a few days lately where it gets below freezing.
But enough about weather - you subscribe to this newsletter to see what’s new and exciting to me in the world of tech, and I have a couple of fun things to share that I think you’ll like.
If you enjoy learning from videos, there’s six new ones on YouTube deep diving into some of the most common React Hooks you’ll reach for while writing code.
That’s right, six of the videos I made for my course “The newline Guide to Modernizing Enterprise React Apps” are now available for free for everyone to watch on YouTube.
Here’s a quick introductory video if you’re curious to learn more.
In these videos we’ll cover:
A brief history of why Hooks were introduced to React,
Then we go through the Hooks you’ll use most:
The
useState
HookThe
useEffect
HookThe
useRef
HookThe
useContext
HookAnd of course, custom hooks!
I’m really excited there are available to the general public, and I hope you find them useful as well. Even if you already feel pretty confident in your use of Hooks, you might give them a look - you never know when you’ll learn something new.
For the readers among you, I also wrote a new blog post about how to create an asset tracker map with Next.js and React Leaflet.
In the middle of last year, I joined the Internet of Things startup Blues Wireless, and began dipping my toes into IoT development, although my primary expertise is still squarely in the world of web development.
Recently, I built a custom dashboard using Next.js to track one of my company’s devices, and display all the data it was reporting, and I learned a ton of interesting things along the way.
So in the first of a series of blog posts I intend to write about taking IoT sensor data gathered from devices “on the edge” and displaying it in dashboards online, I started off by showing how to add a map to a Next.js application, pull in location data from a third-party API source, and regularly revalidate the data to update the map when new location data is present.
It’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself.
You can even make your own GPS asset tracker to feed location data to a dashboard for under $100 with a Blues Wireless Notecard and Notecarrier just like I did.
Stay tuned for future installments as I cover other aspects of building this app like styling custom charts, rendering multiple paths on a map at once, and more.
Here’s a video of the full dashboard if you’d like to see the finished product:
Finally, I published a blog on Google Jib: the best way to get the power of Docker in Java apps without having to know Docker.
Not to worry if you missed my other two Docker articles: Docker 101: Docker basics and Docker 102: Docker Compose, with the introduction of Google’s Java plugin Jib, Docker knowledge to get containerization up and running is no longer required.
Simply by adding the Jib plugin to your Java project, you can get out of the box Docker image generation and publication. No Dockerfile
or Docker complexity, no customized Maven or Gradle scripting, all of the Docker benefits.
It’s truly awesome how simple it is to get power and flexibility of a Docker container with none of the setup and necessary knowledge about Docker.
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 February,
- Paige