Our Latest Insights

Thoughts from our team on current events, new techniques and tools, trends we're seeing, and our culture.

14 results shown.
  • Introducing Appr: A New Review Workflow for Mobile Developers

    March 29, 2017
    Appr builds pull requests in your Create React Native App project, deploys the changes to Expo, and posts a link and a QR code to your PR, so you can run the app on your device or emulator in seconds! I'm sure you'll agree: code reviews are a useful tool in a development...
    Jani Eväkallio
  • Formidable at React London: Offline-First Apps & React Native for Hardware

    March 22, 2017
    Ken Wheeler and Jani Eväkallio will be speaking at React London on Tuesday, March 28th. Ken's wild talk, “Weapons Grade React,” will explore the trials and tribulations he experienced while building a remotely controlled robotic crossbow with React and React Native. Using that experience...
    BL
    Becca Lee
  • React Native App Stack, March 2017

    March 14, 2017
    This week, we started writing a new React Native app. With every new project, I experience a mix of giddy excitement and intense anxiety: an opportunity to right all past mistakes, and a chance to make a thousand new ones. Discussing greenfield tech choices inevitably devolves into...
    Jani Eväkallio
  • Be Bold For Change on Women’s Day

    March 8, 2017
    Happy International Women’s Day! March 8th celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievement of women. As part of our celebration today, we (Autumn and Elise) are reflecting on the state of women at Formidable. As technology workers, we are lucky to be some of the most...
  • Eric Baer Speaking at Voxxed Days Bristol

    March 1, 2017
    Formidafriends in the UK: Formidable Eric Baer is speaking at Voxxed Days Bristol today. Attending? Be sure to check out his talk. Eric will attempt to lay bare the lessons learned from nearly 60 years of API design, from RPC to REST. With mounting pressure on APIs from mobile devices/networks...
    BL
    Becca Lee
  • Faster React SSR with Rapscallion

    February 28, 2017
    React has gained significant momentum over the four years since its initial release, and for good reason. I'll admit that I was initially a skeptic, particularly when it came to the strangeness that is JSX, but I was quickly won over by its codification of small, testable units of code...
    DB
    Dale Bustad
  • Introducing Whackage

    December 1, 2016
    We love React Native. Sometimes, though, it doesn't feel like it reciprocates your love. One such time is when working with codebases that span across multiple repositories. When you want to make changes to a package your app depends on, achieving that snappy hot-reloading workflow you’ve grown...
    Jani Eväkallio
  • Flexible Charting in React with Victory (and Introducing FormidableCharts)

    November 9, 2016
    Victory: React charts tailored to your data Charting directly with d3 can be difficult, but other libraries are often too simplistic. Enter Victory: React charting that is easier than direct use of d3.js but with as much flexibility as possible. Victory allows fully customized charts ranging from...
    Lauren Eastridge
  • On releasing my first OSS project at thirty-five

    October 25, 2016
    A couple weeks ago I released my first open source project at the ripe old age of thirty-five. A dinosaur by tech industry standards or whatever. Computers and programming were something that always came naturally to me in my youth— my first languages were C and x86 assembly. Growing up I...
    JW
    Jason Wilson
  • Introducing Publish-Diff

    October 19, 2016
    Publishing JavaScript projects to the npm registry is an exercise that, while commonplace, is often opaque to developers and fraught with peril. The opacity comes from projects frequently publishing built files that are omitted from git source and some subtle but important differences...
  • Formidable is Now Mobile

    October 18, 2016
    Victory UI Explorer is now available for iOS and Android. Check out what you can do when you combine React Native and Victory, Formidable's charting library. Built by Formidable's own Angela Nicholas. Download Victory UI Explorer for iOS or Android. View the source code for Victory UI...
    Emma Brillhart
  • Introducing NodeJS-Dashboard

    October 12, 2016
    Node.js engineers spend significant amounts of time developing from the console. The usual workflow I've encountered goes something like: npm run test && node index.js which then dumps pages of text to stdout. Errors can easily go unnoticed when large volumes of output are...
    JW
    Jason Wilson
  • Introducing React Progressive Image

    October 3, 2016
    Images can be big, and big can be bad on slow networks. Nobody wants to stare at whitespace while their network struggles to load your beautiful background image, so what can we do? That's where progressive image loading comes in. Progressive image loading can be the difference between...
    BD
    Brandon Dail
  • London: Formidable Has Landed.

    September 29, 2016
    Hi there. I'm Jani Eväkallio, Formidable's new VP of Mobile Engineering. Along with my arrival, today I have the great pleasure of announcing the opening of Formidable in London. In my previous life I was the lead engineer at Futurice London, an early React and React Native advocate,...
    Jani Eväkallio