Quick Tips

Supabase is an incredible Firebase alternative as well as my favorite managed Postgres provider at the moment. It's incredibly easy to use, but without having access to the server the database is hosted on some people might find creating manual backups confusing. So here's how you can create manual backups of your Supabase database. How do I create a backup of a Supabase Database? As previously mentioned, Supabase uses PostgreSQL instances for its databases and thankfully for use Postgres also has some incredibly useful CLI tools. Th

While working with a Next.js API that uses Apollo GraphQL I found my queries were not completing and remained in a pending state indefinitely. Here's how to fix this annoying issue. If you're trying to implement a GraphQL API on Next.js it's likely you've settled on using Apollo GraphQL Micro as it's perfect for use on Next.js' serverless API. If after implementing Apollo you found your queries getting stuck in a pending state it's because of a lesser known Next.js setting. Go into the file where your GraphQL handler runs (for me it was pages/ap

The React useContext hook is an extremely useful tool that is often misused or misunderstood. This can result in components that are tricky to reuse. And that can be a real problem. So here's a quick tip on how to utilise React useContext to simplify your code and make it more reusable. It's likely that at some point in your R

Most apps and sites have elements or menus that overlap others and depending on the number of pages you have you might want to not set these safe areas manually. So here's a little trick to set safe areas with React. Consider this simple interface: Left - Interface without safe areas, Right - with safe areas It contains a scrollable list of cards as well as

Commit messages can easily look like a wall of text and, at a glance, can be hard to follow. Gitmoji, a style guide for adding emojis to your commit, makes this a problem of the past. Today we'll go through how to add emojis to git commits quickly and easily using this resource. If you've been maintaining a project on Github for a while, it's likely you've looked at your list of commits and been disappointed by how hard to find specific things were. And if yo

Learning how to deploy Node.js apps on web-servers like Apache is surprisingly confusing. Here's how you can host your Node.js apps on a standard Apache server. The problem with Node.js and Apache If you've tried to run a Node.js app on a more standard web-server that uses Apache or Nginx, you may have noticed that the process of putting your app online isn't as simple as you thought. Starting the app is easy as you have access to your server's terminal, but soon you'll realise that your app is being shown on yo

MySQL databases are the backbone of the internet. But developing with them can be a pain if you can't afford to run them locally. This solution allows you to connect to your remote MySQL database without any extra setup. I recently had to expand my knowledge and build my own API, rather than using a freely available one. But the hardest part wasn't making the API itself. It was connecting with my Database. But why? A default MySQL installation is likely to block any connection requests happening fr