artwork VS styled-components

They developed a solution, and open sourced it as GraphQL.

I'm using the Official GraphQL, HowToGraphQL and several other websites to curate my own notes on GraphQL.

Your cloud architecture, system design and project leadership skills should be more important than language specifics when interviewing. That being said, I recommend learning about Node.js internals (e.g. the event loop); ES6+ language improvements; and some trending tools and libraries like TypeScript, Docker, Serverless Framework and GraphQL. Know enough about Express and serverless functions justify using one over the other when designing a system.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs define how two pieces of software can connect and talk to each other. If your application were a big company, your API's job would be to keep in touch with external parties (customers or company partners, for example). Most APIs are organized around some standard, like REST or GraphQL, so that everybody knows how to use them.

GraphQL is developed by Facebook initially for their mobile app and has been adopted widely across web apps.

Last week, I built a microservice: a resource for a section of the landing page of the platform, which renders from a database loaded with data. In technical terms, I built and consumed an API. I used Dynamo DB (a database provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS))) to store my data, creating a table with desired fields for me to use in populating my table. GraphQL was used as playground for me to query and mutate my database. i.e. a way of creating, reading, updating and deleting information from the database, a process technically known as CRUD.

GraphQL, if you are not familiar, is a way of having APIs which are query-able similar to SQL for a database.

GraphQL.org

More than that, it's a good idea for storing non-sensitive data across the application. It might be a Redux or GraphQL state or some global app-wide variables. On the other hand, you shouldn’t use that for storing tokens and secrets, as the storage is not encrypted in any way.

AWS AppSync is a fully managed GraphQL API which is a serverless offering by AWS.

CSS-in-JS is a styling technique wherein CSS is composed using JavaScript instead of defined in external files. This method allows CSS to be scoped locally to components rather than globally, reducing the probability of style conflicts. Utilizing JavaScript also enables dynamic styling easily aligned with the component's state or props. Libraries like Styled Components and Emotion are popular choices in the React ecosystem for adopting this method.

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.