The personal blog of ryanlanciauxhttps://ryanlanciaux.com/en-ushttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/09/11/react-native-in-an-industry-thats-changing/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/09/11/react-native-in-an-industry-thats-changing/Shopify is moving from React Native to Swift / Kotlin. The article was interesting, and I highly recommend reading it. My takeaway is that agents change the dynamics around building software. Although React Native was a huge success for them, it's no longer how they want to build their mobile apps…Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/09/06/you-dont-need-better-agents-you-need-a-better-agent-strategy/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/09/06/you-dont-need-better-agents-you-need-a-better-agent-strategy/Escoffier's kitchens didn't necessarily have better cooks. Structure did the work. Same with agents: brigade beats prompting and hoping.Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:56:00 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/08/18/pi-learn-once-keep-your-tools/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/08/18/pi-learn-once-keep-your-tools/Trying Pi as a daily driver so I'm not locked into any model, and I have more control over the tools I use every day.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:52:35 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/08/11/make-your-ai-earn-its-keep/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/08/11/make-your-ai-earn-its-keep/A file-based meal and grocery system for LLMs. No code, no database — just markdown files, store circulars, and a weekly plan that can cover the subscription cost.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:49:57 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/07/16/steering-coding-agents-one-small-diff-at-a-time/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2026/07/16/steering-coding-agents-one-small-diff-at-a-time/Want more control over the code an agent is writing? A Hunk-based workflow for reviewing small diffs before they become a large one.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:01:01 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/07/13/quick-github-profile-visit-counter/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/07/13/quick-github-profile-visit-counter/GitHub profiles are a great addition to the platform. These profiles allow you to highlight your experience/interests and supply a little bit of personality to what people see when they visit your profile. There are quite a few guides on creating a profile, but for those who may not have jumped…Mon, 13 Jul 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/02/14/better-testing-with-storybook/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/02/14/better-testing-with-storybook/In this article, we will discuss strategy that I like to help keep Storybook stories up-to-date. For those that are unfamiliar, Storybook is a UI component workspace that I find helpful in building front-end applications. It allows you to develop your components in isolation, interact with these…Fri, 14 Feb 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/31/optional-chaining-in-javascript/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/31/optional-chaining-in-javascript/In this article, we're going to take a quick look at the new, Optional Chaining operator in JavaScript. This language feature is valid JavaScript as of ES 2020 (the official definition of the language). To take a look at why I think this feature is compelling, let's assume we have an object that…Fri, 31 Jan 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/22/nullish-coalescing-in-javascript/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/22/nullish-coalescing-in-javascript/Nullish Coalescing is a language feature of JavaScript that was recently promoted to Stage 4 by TC39, the group that maintains the definition of JavaScript. This means that this language feature is valid JavaScript as of ES2020. With any language feature, it's good to understand how it helps us.…Wed, 22 Jan 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/14/snowpack-with-react/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/14/snowpack-with-react/In this article, we're going to build a React application using Snowpack. Snowpack is one of the technologies I'm most excited about right now. It's a little bit like bundler in that it's responsible for preparing an application's third-party dependencies for use on the web but it has enough…Tue, 14 Jan 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/09/an-introduction-to-styled-components/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/09/an-introduction-to-styled-components/In this article, we are going to take a quick look at styled components, a styling library for use with React. While there are many ways to style React applications, styled components stands out as an excellent way style our applications as a series of components using familiar CSS syntax. We will…Thu, 09 Jan 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/02/tailwind-with-react/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2020/01/02/tailwind-with-react/Tailwind is a CSS library in a similar space to things like Bootstrap or Bulma. Tailwind is different that instead of providing CSS for full components, it provides low-level utility classes. What this means is that instead of using class=“button” or “card” or something else, you’ll define your own…Thu, 02 Jan 2020 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/09/25/effortless-application-bundling-react-parcel/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/09/25/effortless-application-bundling-react-parcel/Bundle Web Applications effortlessly Bundlers are used to take our various source files (JavaScript, CSS, Sass, etc). and prepare them for use in the browser. This article assumes that you're already sold on using a bundler for your JavaScript applications. For more information on bundlers and how…Wed, 25 Sep 2019 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/09/20/the-magic-of-a-mise-en-place-mindset-for-frontend-development/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/09/20/the-magic-of-a-mise-en-place-mindset-for-frontend-development/Software development, as an industry, has a constant struggle with shipping quality code. While many developers have metrics for what quality means, there's a challenge in ensuring these metrics are met especially as a codebase grows over time. We build our computer systems the way we build our…Fri, 20 Sep 2019 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/09/16/windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/09/16/windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/My beloved MacBook Pro is currently with Apple Care for some repairs. Unfortunately, I have a lot to do this week and no other computers that are really set up for development. While my computer is in the shop, I'm going to do my normal development work on a Windows desktop I have with Windows…Mon, 16 Sep 2019 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/08/20/use-provider-in-storybook/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/08/20/use-provider-in-storybook/Storybook is awesome for building components I frequently use Storybook and styled components / Emotion when building component libraries. The ability to apply a consistent theme to all components is very powerful but it requires wrapping your components in a ThemeProvider. Thankfully, there is a…Tue, 20 Aug 2019 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/08/19/ignoring-files-in-git/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2019/08/19/ignoring-files-in-git/No, this isn't a post about .gitignore The file is a great way to exclude files from a repository for all users. This post is not about that. I often want to ignore files that a tool / editor I use generates in a project. Others who are working in the project may not be using these same tools so…Mon, 19 Aug 2019 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/10/26/neovim-for-software-development/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/10/26/neovim-for-software-development/I've recently been interested in using the tried-and-true vim editor again. For those unfamiliar, vim is an editor that was first released in 1991. Vim boasts a large community of users, plugins, and add-ons. Most vim users configure their editor quite heavily. This customization is one of the…Wed, 01 May 2019 07:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/10/26/amazon-echo-costume/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/10/26/amazon-echo-costume/My daughter is super ecstatic about Amazon Echo. When it came time to pick a Halloween Costume, she quickly decided an Amazon Echo is what she wanted to be. I was more than happy to help her see this interest come to fruition! I initially started down the path of building a Raspberry Pi with AVS. I…Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:37:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/20/a-feature-based-approach-to-react-development/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/20/a-feature-based-approach-to-react-development/There are a lot of opinions around how to arrange a React project. In this post, I want to talk about feature folders and why I think they are a great choice for React application structure. Focus on the goal rather than the technology In many languages and frameworks, the prevailing wisdom is to…Thu, 24 Aug 2017 06:37:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/20/releasing-node-packages/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/20/releasing-node-packages/When releasing a new version of an open source project, it's important to make sure a series of things happen in the same order for every release. I've attempted to make a "script" I follow for releasing Griddle to npm that helps promote consistent releases and (as much as possible) illuminates any…Sun, 20 Aug 2017 05:52:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/17/running-jest-on-linux/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/17/running-jest-on-linux/I frequently switch between devices and operating systems and recently ran into a strange bug when running unit tests in Linux. Jest would run just fine on macOS and Windows, but when I ran my tests on Linux I would receive an error message mentioning . This error traditionally means the hard drive…Thu, 17 Aug 2017 16:44:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/13/migrating-to-gatsby-from-octopress/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/13/migrating-to-gatsby-from-octopress/Octopress is an awesome blogging platform that has served me well for quite some time but recently I've migrated to Gatsby (since it is built with a tech stack I frequently use). The steps I've taken to do this are as follows: 1. Setup Gatsby for blogging See here 1. Move posts from Octopress into…Sun, 13 Aug 2017 05:54:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/12/blogging-with-gatsby/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2017/08/12/blogging-with-gatsby/I've been using Gatsby for quite some time on the Griddle documentation and really like it. I wanted to start writing more and thought a fresh start to the blogging system I am using was in order. A couple of the reasons I've chosen to go with Gatsby (in no particular order): 1. It's built with…Sat, 12 Aug 2017 12:03:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2016/11/17/setup-bash-on-windows-my-environment-configuration/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2016/11/17/setup-bash-on-windows-my-environment-configuration/Inspired by some recent conversations on Twitter, I've decided to give Bash on Windows another shot. This post contains the steps I've taken to install and configure Bash on Windows to closely resemble my Linux / Mac settings for JavaScript and node development (with some extra steps I've taken for…Thu, 17 Nov 2016 23:32:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/11/17/miscellaneous-jest-issues-slash-workarouds-ii/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/11/17/miscellaneous-jest-issues-slash-workarouds-ii/My brother recently installed Jest on his Windows machine and alerted me that there were some problems that he encountered when using Visual Studio 2013 Express to compile some of the requirements. Check out his full post on what he did to resolve (tldr: Install Express 2012 and update the…Mon, 17 Nov 2014 02:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/10/28/miscellaneous-jest-issues-slash-workarounds/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/10/28/miscellaneous-jest-issues-slash-workarounds/I've been using Jest a bit lately and wanted to document some issues I've run into for future reference. ##Debugging Jest Tests## Recently I had a test that was failing and from looking at the stack trace it wasn't really clear why. I followed some advice I had seen about running jest in-band and…Tue, 28 Oct 2014 20:44:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/10/28/react-plus-jest-testing-on-windows-ii/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/10/28/react-plus-jest-testing-on-windows-ii/Last time I wrote about running Jest on Windows there was one thing I left out. The test output would show if the tests pass or fail but no data is displayed regarding why they fail. This is due to an issue with stdio in Windows, however, there appears to be a fix in the works. Until that fix makes…Tue, 28 Oct 2014 03:14:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/10/18/azure-active-directory-authentication-in-existing-project/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/10/18/azure-active-directory-authentication-in-existing-project/Recently, I needed to add Azure Active directory authentication to an existing web project. There was an automated tool for Visual Studio 2012 but there does not seem to be a similar component for 2013. A lot of the advice I found suggested creating a new project and importing a bit of the code /…Sat, 18 Oct 2014 04:28:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/08/02/using-jest-for-testing-react-components-on-windows/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/08/02/using-jest-for-testing-react-components-on-windows/I'm currently going through the process creating unit tests for Griddle and thought it would be good to document the steps I took to get Jest up and running. I did not find it as simple as typing , however it was not too bad. My primary machine is running Windows 8 -- these steps may be a bit…Sat, 02 Aug 2014 12:37:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/07/08/introducing-griddle-a-react-dot-js-grid/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/07/08/introducing-griddle-a-react-dot-js-grid/Many of the websites I have worked on have required a grid component. As I had been exploring React.js more it was made apparent that I was going to need a grid component for it to be a viable my projects. There are many great solutions for displaying grid data with React but many seem to rely on…Tue, 08 Jul 2014 01:01:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/26/trying-out-reactjs-with-the-marvel-api/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/26/trying-out-reactjs-with-the-marvel-api/I've recently started looking into ReactJS (Facebook's front-end JavaScript library) for building web UIs. React has an interesting philosophy about how the UI should function and be defined. First off, while many frameworks have an entire system for interacting with the server, routing, etc, React…Mon, 26 May 2014 18:29:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/25/debugging-express-applications/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/25/debugging-express-applications/Coming from the .NET world, I've grown accustomed to great debugging tools. My initial Node setup didn't have a very good way to debug an application (outside of using ) and I wanted to resolve that. I had heard about node-inspector in several places and decided to give that a shot. Node-inspector…Sun, 25 May 2014 16:18:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/15/running-ssh-agent-on-windows/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/15/running-ssh-agent-on-windows/There was one thing I didn't mention in my previous post about running Octopress on a Vagrant machine -- in the machine's current state (with Windows as a host machine), we cannot deploy the site with a command. The reason for this is we don't have an ssh key available to the Vagrant box. While we…Thu, 15 May 2014 03:41:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/13/vagrantfile-for-octopress/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/05/13/vagrantfile-for-octopress/I've recently started using Vagrant for managing lightweight virtual machines for various projects. Vagrant is awesome because it allows you to: 1. Configure an environment for a specific project / application -- For instance, if you want to install Ruby / Rails and a mongo database, you can set up…Tue, 13 May 2014 03:59:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/03/06/-thoughts-on-microsoft-surface/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2014/03/06/-thoughts-on-microsoft-surface/Last fall, I won a Microsoft Surface 2 as part of the Surface Remix Project contest. I always love to win gadgets but this was a bit more exciting to me as I am a hobby music producer (shameless link to some of my music). I was initially planning on using the device for the music app/remix blade,…Thu, 06 Mar 2014 20:15:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/10/16/fake-popovers-for-angular-xeditable/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/10/16/fake-popovers-for-angular-xeditable/I was recently working on a project with AngularJS and xeditable (if you're not familiar, xeditable is an awesome library for inline editing). There is an Angular version of xeditable but the popover editing functionality is not implemented yet (it's in the roadmap). Instead of using the original…Wed, 16 Oct 2013 21:58:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/08/17/learning-angularjs-iii-routes/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/08/17/learning-angularjs-iii-routes/So far we've covered the basics of using AngularJS to interact with RESTful services and Filtering / Ordering views in AngularJS. Using AngularJS Routes, we are going to add a bit of structure to this example app. If you have not already, please take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 as we will be…Sat, 17 Aug 2013 19:47:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/06/19/angularjs-filtering-slash-ordering/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/06/19/angularjs-filtering-slash-ordering/Last time I wrote about some basic AngularJS functionality for interacting with a RESTful API. We're going to continue where with left off with our food inventory app to add some filtering/sorting . Check out the first post if you missed it, as we will be depending heavily on what is covered there.…Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:38:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/06/05/note-to-self-escape-liquidtags-with-jekyll-raw-tag-plugin/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/06/05/note-to-self-escape-liquidtags-with-jekyll-raw-tag-plugin/When reviewing my recent AngularJS post, I noticed that none of my template display bindings were showing up. LiquidTags use the same {% raw %}{{ }}{% endraw %} style bindings as AngularJS (and was trying to render my Angular expressions as LiquidTags). Luckily, there is a jekyll plugin called 'raw…Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:57:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/06/04/learning-angularjs/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/06/04/learning-angularjs/I have recently been playing around with some of the client-side MV frameworks. I have avoided Angular for quite some time because I was not a fan of using ng-click (etc.) HTML attributes to fire off js events. The more I've used the framework, however, the less of an issue that has been to me. As…Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:39:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/09/less-alt-plus-tab-with-sublimetext/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/09/less-alt-plus-tab-with-sublimetext/Back in April, I jokingly lamented not having the ability to run a console from directly within SublimeText -- apparently I did not do quite enough searching. There is a plug-in called SublimeREPL that lets you run ruby, node and a whole slew of other environments from within SublimeText. To…Thu, 09 May 2013 20:40:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/07/tig-great-git-command-line-tool/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/07/tig-great-git-command-line-tool/I have been using git on most of my hobby projects for quite some time. I prefer the command line when possible, however, it is nice to visualize certain operations. SourceTree and Github's Windows and Mac apps are very nice but I'm mostly on Ubuntu when using git. Gitk is a decent option but…Tue, 07 May 2013 20:28:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/03/ikea-standing-desk/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/03/ikea-standing-desk/Over the past several years, I have grown quite accustomed to using a standing desk at home (I have an adjustable Ergotron that I absolutely love). I decided it was about time to make the switch at work, however, I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a desk. Thankfully, I had come across a blog…Fri, 03 May 2013 21:02:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/02/goodreads-status-widget-available-on-github/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/05/02/goodreads-status-widget-available-on-github/Goodreads is currently one of my favorite sites; I love that I can see what my friends are reading and find new books to read based on their recommendations. Noticing that many other blog platforms have sidebar widgets (asides), I decided to create one for Octopress. The first thing I did was make…Thu, 02 May 2013 19:49:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/04/13/sublime-text-on-ubuntu/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/04/13/sublime-text-on-ubuntu/Recently, I have switched from Windows 8 to Ubuntu on my laptop. Since the primary function of my laptop is development I have spent some time tweaking the software installed to fit my workflow. The main tool I am using for all my development is Sublime Text. I like Sublime Text for many reasons --…Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:42:03 GMThttps://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/04/06/moving-to-octopress/https://ryanlanciaux.com/blog/2013/04/06/moving-to-octopress/This post is about moving my site to Octopress (I have since moved to Gatsby)Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:11:03 GMT