June 2023: Automate Pull Request Creation with GitHub Actions
More learnings from building my first open source software library, and podcast interviews with two very influential folks in the web development community.
Hi folks,
We’ve finally well and truly reached summertime in the US - both by the calendar and by the heat outside.
Lucky for me, I’ve not been experiencing the record breaking heat wave folks over in the central part of the country have been, but even in Georgia (where I live) temps are rising steadily.
I hope you’re enjoying good weather wherever you may be, let’s catch up with what happened in tech in the month of June.
This month, I interviewed not one but two prominent Rachels in the web development community on the LogRocket podcast PodRocket: Rachel Nabors and Rachel Andrew.
Yes, you heard that right, I had the good fortune to talk one-on-one two a couple of prominent voices helping shape web development today.
While talking with Rachel Nabors, of React documentation fame, we dove into what it was like making the React docs more inclusive to earlier career devs, transitioning from more of an individual contributor role at Meta to a technical program manager role at Amazon, and Rachel’s advice for how to survive in big tech companies, including weathering the job uncertainty and layoffs that are commonplace at the moment.
With Rachel Andrew, prolific author, speaker, and champion of all things CSS, we spoke about her current role as content lead for Chrome Developer Relations at Google and her latest project Baseline, a tool to bring clarity about browser support for web platform features. The idea for Baseline is that as more and more web platform features like CSS grid or deep copy in JavaScript are supported by all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari), that Baseline will serve as a place where developers can see what works well across all platforms. It’s a very cool initiative.
Continuing my short series on building my first open source software library, I wrote this month about automatically creating new pull requests against a feature branch with GitHub Actions.
Earlier this year I built my first bit of open source software (OSS): a JavaScript-based library for the Notehub API. I work for the Internet of things company, Blues, and Notehub is the cloud where all our IoT devices send their data.
In order to make the Notehub API easier to work with for JavaScript developers (like myself), I built Notehub JS and published it to npm. And since the Notehub API that the library is based on continues to evolve and improve, I set up a bunch of automated workflows using GitHub Actions to automate things like:
Publishing new versions of the library to npm.
Opening new pull requests in GitHub and tagging myself when there’s code changes to review.
Copy files from one repo to another and add the changes to a new branch.
This article focused on my second bullet point: open a new PR in the Notehub JS repo and tag me to review it when there’s new code changes. The GitHub Action workflow I set up even allowed me to use a GitHub pull request template to help keep the new PRs uniform.
It turned out pretty slick, if I do say so, myself.
Finally, I blogged about using a Spring Cloud config server to update feature toggles in a React app without needing to redeploy the app.
Feature toggles are a great way to introduce new features to a small subsection of an app’s user base to evaluate how well the feature works before turning it on for all users.
Typically, enabling a feature toggle in a JavaScript app required rebuilding and redeploying the app to production, but by using a Spring Cloud Config server and the npm library Cloud Config Client, that rebuilding requirement became a thing of the past.
In this post, learn how to configure a Node.js server and React application so when feature toggles need to be updated, a simple REST endpoint refresh is all it takes.
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 July,
- Paige
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