Five Awesome Tech Articles
Medium is notorious for low-quality tech content, so here are gems pertaining to interview preparation, frontend web development, and cybersecurity
Using a React 16 Portal to do something cool, by David Gilbertson
This article, in short, demonstrates a way to make a button that opens a separate window. That window will have the same styling as the first, and it will have access to the same fields.
Not sure what that means? One CodePen is worth a thousand words.
Background
David Gilbertson is a popular blogger and software developer. He is focused on React.js, but “multi-window” is a fairly common use case in more than one framework. Create a frontend component with a little button, so that if the user clicks on said button, a new window will appear. Ideally, it should also have the same styling and access to the same fields.
Someone on StackOverflow asked, “How do I open a Vue.js component on a new window?”
The most common response was that you can’t, but a user named Alex referenced the David Gilbertson article and proved that you can…with a single line…by effectively inserting a DOM element for a vue component into the body of a child window.
Caveats
As a user on StackOverflow comments, if the parent window is closed the child will be as well. This could certainly be called a hacky solution, but it also takes a fairly complex problem and solves it in a very simple way.
A better way? I am not sure, but Golden Layout looks promising.
Taking Hash Tables Off The Shelf, By BaseCS
This article is by BaseCS, a one-woman Medium publication that is completely free and complete with custom illustrations, lighthearted analogies, and enough puns to power a small city.
BaseCS is exactly the kind of content I wish I had known about in college — it is more clearly-written than a textbook, more useful than most of the content on Medium tech publications, and more comprehensive than much of the interview preparation content on tech blogs in general. The article attached is on hashmaps, one of the most commonly used data structures in software engineer interviews.
The 30-minute guide to rocking your next coding interview, by Yangshun Tay
Like HackerNoon, FreeCodeCamp is a tech publication that became its own website when the creators grew tired of Medium. Unlike HackerNoon, FreeCodeCamp is primarily focused on tutorials (one of my two HackerNoon articles was actually a FreeCodeCamp reject) and edits rather rigorously. Also, both are free of Medium’s oppressive paywalls.
In this article, Yangshun Tay lays out an overview of software engineer interview preparation resources. He is currently a software engineer at Meta, he created something called Blind75 on LeetCode (and, as an additional contribution, Grind75), and he frequents Reddit and LeetCode discussions fairly regularly.
Preparing for the Facebook interview — A brutally honest guide
InterviewNoodle is a great Medium publication, and it is curated by one of the creators of Grokking The Coding Interview (making it somewhat ironic that the article above is critical of Grokking The Coding Interview).
This article is about the Facebook interview, and like Yangshun Tay’s it is complete with a comprehensive list of resources. It also cautions against simply memorizing LeetCode and chooses to focus instead on the fundamentals.
I still have a high opinion of InterviewNoodle, but much of its content is paywall-blocked and I am not sure how FadinGeek keeps getting in…that is a blog that promotes NFTs, complains about Vim, and just generally keeps throwing unrelated content into the mix.
I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.
This article is another piece by David Gilbertson, and it is the most popular Medium post I have ever seen. Also, in spite of the seemingly click-baity title, every single comment I have read on it is positive.
If you are skeptical, I encourage you to give it a read yourself.
Is this the best cybersecurity blog post? Probably not, but I could not link this article because it is technically not Medium. The latter post is by the host of DarkNetDiaries, a podcast focused almost exclusively on modern-day hacking…he interviews former criminals, cybersecurity experts from the Department of Defense, and even penetration testers who simply break into buildings.
David Gilbertson’s post is a little more about web than it is about cybersecurity, highlighting some of the problems with npm.
Closing Thoughts
I had a lengthy rant I just wrote complaining about the JavaScript In Plain English publication, but it was pretty mean.
So instead, I am closing with this video of a corgi howling with a siren.
