Sharing Frontside's latest discoveries
Find useful ideas and practical tips on apps engineering through our articles and podcast.

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OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker
In this episode, Austin Parker, Principal Developer Advocate at Lightstep talks about the OpenTelemetry Framework, which is an observability framework for cloud-native software and a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs.
Listen to episode →Paying Open Source Contributors with Puneet Lath
In this episode, Puneet Lath, Director of Research and Development at Expensify, talks about the unique way Expensify is using open source with their products by not just open-sourcing software tools but also open-sourcing the front end of the product itself
Listen to episode →There and Back Again: Testing and Stack Upgrades
Upgrading your application stack to new major versions can be terrifying, especially when you have a massive application with 75 developers working on features non-stop. However, a good testing strategy gives you confidence to make bold moves that take your organization to heretofore unexplored lands.
Read article →Product Roadmaps and Tooling Planning with Steve Pereira
In this episode, Steve Pereira—the founder of Visible—talks about how their unique approach to mapping helps customers get products out of the door fast and efficiently.
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Data, Trust, and Transparency: A COVID-19 Vaccine Story
Data is at the center of everything we do. Yet, how can we trust it in a world where more "organic" food is consumed than produced? As COVID-19 vaccines are getting ready to be offered at a never-seen scale, blockchain can help develop the trust and transparency that we need.
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Kubernetes: Dip your toes in this
Kubernetes is on the rise and having it in your toolkit can get you a long way. In this article, Min shows us how to set up a MicoK8s in your local machine.
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The context dilemma: design tokens and components
Design tokens are used to keep a consistent look across an entire system. How do you name them semantically if they have to make sense everywhere but also respond to the inner logic of individual components which are independently developed?
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Intro to Rush.js with co-author Pete Gonzales
Monorepos are the new muse of library maintainers, but what happens when your project grows past 100 packages in the same repo? What about thousands? Rush.js was created for those cases, and Pete—who started the project while working at Microsoft—is here to tell us about it.
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Renaming `main` with purpose
As generic default branch names like `master` for Git repos have gone out of fashion, possibilities emerge for more effective and informative naming conventions. Learn about the branch naming strategy Frontside uses for our Open Source libraries and how we name app project branches.
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MirageJS: Choosing the right Serializer
MirageJS ships with four out-of-the-box serializers. In this blog post, we overview the basics of serializers in Mirage, and examine in detail the specific format of each JSON API, Active Model, Rest and generic serializers.
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Type systems with ReasonML London organizer Marcel Cutts and Shane Wilson
"Java has done an excellent job at ruining types for everyone for quite a while—explains Marcel after describing the tech pub scene in London—but it's important to know there's more than one kind of type system." Along with Shane, they outline what's exciting about ReasonML and their experience with new languages and tools around types.
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Beyond Mocking: Decoupling teams through Simulation
Decoupling front-end and mobile teams from the back-end makes organizations more effective. In this article we explain why using simulation is an ideal strategy for this purpose, and present important considerations for adopting such practices.
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The Lesson of BigTest Interactors: never write a flaky test again!
To prevent flaky tests, BigTest introduces the Interactor API, designed around the lessons learned in Capybara. This article introduces the benefits of Interactors in BigTest and how to use them to write reliable tests.
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Github Actions: a deep dive into pull_request
We have put together specific behaviors and information that you’ll need to use pull_request as a trigger for your Github Actions workflow.
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