The UpgradeJS Blog

To the seasoned developer this may seem like a silly question, but to developers who are self-taught, bootcamp trained, or even just have never come across a project in TypeScript - understanding exactly what it is and how to use it can be a bit of a mystery.

In this article we will try to explain the basic concepts behind TypeScript, and the reasons for using it.

In modern apps, it’s common to enhance the user experience with JavaScript. Whether it’s just some JavaScript sprinkles here and there or a full JS-based frontend, this is as important as your Ruby code when it comes to the app’s correct functionality. In this article we’ll show how to measure the test code coverage for the JavaScript code when running system/integration tests along with the Ruby code coverage.

With the release of Rails 6, Webpack was introduced as the default JavaScript bundler by using the Webpacker gem. We tend to think about Webpack only as a tool to handle JavaScript files, but it can be used to handle all kinds of asset files. This article shows how to create a Rails app that uses only Webpack to handle all the assets, including images, fonts, styles and videos.

In keeping with the first part of this series, I’ll list a few interesting issues we found when making the apps work as similar as possible for Android’s webview and iOS’ webview.

Over the last few months, we developed a couple of Snap Minis. Minis are small static web apps that are run inside a webview within the Snapchat native app.

One important part of the development was to make sure our Mini works well across different devices, especially making sure things work the same in both Android’s webview (Chrome by default) and iOS’s webview (Safari).

In this post I’ll talk about a few things to keep in mind when working with the Snap Canvas SDK and in the next one I’ll talk about some common and known issues you’ll encounter when making your app cross-mobile-browser compatible.

Contributing to open source projects is a big part of our philosophy at OmbuLabs. It’s even written into our values. Some of us like to contribute to open source even in our spare time!

Recently we have been thinking about what guidelines we should follow when starting a new open source project, and also about how to organize and keep track of the ones we contribute to.

This article will give you some tips on keeping those open source projects organized, and also how to start them off on the right foot.

There are some really great guides for starting a new open source projects, yet when it comes to dealing with a possibly abandoned, unmaintained project, there is no definitive guide for users, contributors, or maintainers.

I hope that this can be a useful guide for our community.

Problem

When do you declare that an open source project has been abandoned? How many days have to go by until you start maintaining your own fork? What’s the standard for communicating with maintainers, contributors, and users? How do you avoid n competing OSS forks of popular projects? How do you avoid duplicated work by people who want to maintain popular, but unmaintained OSS projects? What’s the best way to find that one fork everybody is using?