I recently ran into an issue where I was executing a continuous computation that returned intermediate results that I wanted to display in a React component in real time. …

I changed my insurance recently. After I retired from my job in tech, I was on COBRA. After 18 months I had to change to one of the insurance policies on my state’s exchange. There were a lot of policies to choose from, but the website made some plan recommendations…

I recently made some minor contributions to an open source project that took a GraphQL schema as its input and generated viable SQL dialects for various databases. Since I have worked with GraphQL quite a bit in the past I liked the idea of fleshing out a GraphQL API, which…

What is data visualization? Anybody who has used a diagram or a chart to illustrate numeric or other data has practiced data visualization. This post will be about a specific data visualization technique called a heatmap. A heatmap uses colors and location to characterize data. That data may be about actual heat (temperature), but…

I’m either comfortably retired or unemployed, I haven’t decided which. What I do know is that I am not yet ready for decades of hard-won knowledge to lie fallow. Still driven to learn new technologies and to develop new projects, I see the experience and results generally getting better over…

I recently started a personal project where I wanted to use a database in the cloud. There are quite a few to choose from. My main criteria was that it be something low or no cost. Eventually I decided on Firestore, using the Spark Plan. This plan gives me 5Gb…

Use JavaScript to understand how recursion can lead to a stack overflow and tricks to prevent it from happening — The call stack is not an infinite resource. This is especially true when performing deep recursion. Functions calls within functions are placed on the call stack further up, which means each recursive call sits on the call stack, waiting to be executed. The call stack size is not fixed in…

You are probably familiar with Texas Holdem, a variant of poker where two cards, known as hole cards, are dealt face down to each player, and then five community cards are dealt face up in three stages, for a total of four stages in all. …

There are several techniques for refetching data. In this article, we explore them by example. — The setup In Giving React + GraphQL a Lift with Apollo-Boost, I demonstrated how to get React application up and running quickly, and then how to incorporate the ApolloClient React components from apollo-boost. At the time of that writing, I used the Apollo Launchpad service to create a GraphQL server instance, but…