Blog | Andrej Gajdos | Freelance Full Stack Web App Developer

The Toolkit of a Freelance Full Stack Web Developer

Becoming a freelance full stack web developer requires a lot of work and love of learning. At first sight it might be overwhelming to understand what you need to know and learn to make an entire web application on your own. Over the years I’ve built a lot of web applications and custom websites as a full stack web developer. Regardless of what I am building, I always try to choose tools best suited for the project.

JavaScript

Authenticating Users in SPA using Node, Passport, React and…

Implementing user authentication can be a difficult task, because we can use various libraries and authentication strategies. There are a lot of tutorials on this topic, but often times they miss fundamental information or don’t reflect set up of our project. In this blog post, I don’t attempt to write an universal tutorial for user authentication. However, I will point out some parts in authentication flow I didn’t find in other tutorials.

Web development

List of Free Online Tools For Front-end Web Development…

Often times, as a front-end developer you are required to do tasks, which are more related to web design. For instance, you are asked to make some animations, add “nice background colors”, “readable fonts”, etc. As an engineer, dabbling in anything related to web design can be both fun and frustrating.

Mac

My favourite tools for OS X

Yes, this is another post about favourite tools for Mac. I have used OS X for over two years and during this time I have come across tools that simplify my workflow. One part of this list is related to software engineering, because last year I was programming mainly in JavaScript and Java.

JavaScript

How to Convert SVG Sprite into PNG Images

If you want to use SVG sprites for your icons, you can find several great generators which can create a robust icon system for you. Unfortunately, some of these services don’t generate icons in PNG format and SVG is not supported in IE8 and some older browsers on iOS and Android. If you often change icons or their colors, it is annoying to always use a graphic editor to update PNG images.

JavaScript

Setting up Webpack for ES6, React, SASS and Bootstrap

If you want to start using Webpack as a module bundler for your React application, you can find great tutorials with detailed instructions (1, 2, 3). In this short blog post I want to share my webpack config, which is based on these tutorials.

JavaScript

My first public speech – How to use React.js

A friend of mine organises a meetup about web technologies and asked me if I want to speak about React.js. My last presentation was about my master thesis and I thought it is a great opportunity to renew my presentation skills (not sure if I have some).

Web development

Increasing productivity in JetBrains IDEs

Every software engineer goes through a lot of IDEs and editors (Eclipse, Netbeans, Sublime, Atom, Brackets, …) and all of them have their bottlenecks: performance, insufficient error highlighting, code completion, refactoring methods or high memory usage.

JavaScript

How to avoid refactoring in your first React.js application

Popularity of React.js is growing pretty fast and it seems like React became a compact and beautiful way of how to develop your applications. I have worked on a side project and felt like it is right time to try React. During development of my first project in React I had to do several refactorings. In this short blog post I will try to point out some pitfalls, which you should take care of if you want to avoid refactoring in your first React.js application.

Web development

My first week with Atom editor

In my previous post I summed up my favorite packages for the Sublime Text editor. I use the editor for minor edits in front end development (mostly in JavaScript). Atom is a new promising editor developed and maintained by Github. The first major version of Atom was released more than a half year ago and I thought now is the right time to try this editor.