After a year of dogfooding, a complete rebuild, and 110+ commits, we are excited to release Devlab v3.

It’s a quiet Saturday, it’s wet out, and I don’t feel like doing much, so I open up Netflix. We all know how that typically goes, but today I actually know what I want to watch—Mad Max: Fury Road. Part of me already knows it’s not available to stream, but I start typing it into the search bar anyway—m. Immediately suggestions starting with the letter ‘m’ fill the page (including actors’ names), which become slightly more focused with each new letter. I know I would never watch many of them, but others, eh, maybe, and others still are already favorites. And it’s all thanks to the data from my personal viewing history being put to work behind the scenes to influence the results.

Validating email is simple, right? Just throw a regex at it? Well it’s not as simple as you might think. The RFC Spec (Page 27 of this monster, if you’re interested) is clear as mud on what constitutes a valid email.

So you figured out Where Flux Went Wrong and are shipping your app with Redux. How will you measure usage? Will you know how users are using it once it’s launched? What about user authentication? You’ll definitely want to track that. But how will you do it?

Data is what programming is all about. Applications would be nothing without that beautiful i/o of data moving between modules, services, and data storage. But data is nothing if it’s not consistent.

Flow is pretty awesome.

In your web application, how secure do you require your users’ credentials to be? Do you require passwords to be a certain length, with enough kinds of different characters? Maybe you’re more progressive and employ two-factor auth, or alternative auth like biometrics or single-use SMS keys. If you do use passwords, maybe you’re using a compute or space-expensive hashing algorithm like bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2, or Argon2 to keep them safe. Maybe you’re encrypting your entire database on disk to keep your users as safe as possible. Nothing short of an attacker compromising your live database could leak that data out.

Already comfortable with the history around ReactJS and Flux? Skip to Flux and Component State to jump right into the problem statement.

When Babel 6 dropped on my birthday I was taken aback by all the breaking changes, disclaimers and continued push to use the .babelrc file without a lot of justification from the maintainers. Nevertheless I knew Babel 6 was the future, so I went ahead and added support to my React Native Webpack Starter Kit. Everything went smooth given the small scope of the app, but for some app maintainers the Babel 6 upgrade also meant chucking decorators due to an issue in Babel 6.

If you’ve used DevLab you know a core capability is spinning up services. Services get linked into your container and make them available ephemerally for easy testing of databases, APIs, micro-services, etc.