Posts by Garrett McCullough
Creating Your First npm Package
Creating Your First npm Package Lately, I’ve been pushing myself to contribute more to open source. I started by contributing to existing projects: small features and writing documentation. I even wrote a blog post about it. This past week, I was finally able to make the jump from contributing to a project to authoring one.…
Read MoreGetting Started in Open Source
Getting Started in Open Source “The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs” – Richard Stallman Recently, I’ve been working to contribute more to Open Source software. The following post is based on that experience and research for a presentation I did with Jordan Papaleo for TahoeJS. Contributing to Open Source…
Read MoreFrom Ski Instructor to Programmer – My Journey Back to Programming
On the surface, I have a stereotypical story for a programmer: I started programming at a young age, went to college for computer science and now I’m a senior JavaScript developer. But for around 8 years, I didn’t program at all and didn’t work in a technical field. This is the story of how I…
Read MoreFixing the React Native Error: “Unable to open URL: telprompt”
At Build.com, we use Bugsnag to help monitor our app for crashes and errors. The other day, I noticed a group of errors that all took the form: Error: Unable to open URL: telprompt:5551231234 After some research, I figured out what was causing the bug and how to fix it.
Read MoreFixing the Jest Error, “Invariant Violation: addComponentAsRefTo”
I work on the Build.com React Native app. We’re currently on a push to dramatically increase our test coverage. Recently, I came across a bug that affects some, but not all, of our tests. Tests fail with the message: Invariant Violation: addComponentAsRefTo(…): Only a ReactOwner can have refs. You might be adding a ref to…
Read MoreMy Favorite Developer Podcasts
For the month of March, a number of podcasts that I listen to have been encouraging people to tell others about their favorite podcasts using the hashtag, #TryPod. I love listening to podcasts while driving or while I walk around the neighborhood or grocery stores. They’re interesting, educational, entertaining and many are created with high…
Read MoreMultiple Distributions with Jekyll, Pandoc & Markdown
Some time ago, I got the idea that I should write a book about something. I wasn’t quite sure of the topic but I thought it would be an interesting exercise. While contemplating that idea, I reasoned that, if I wrote a book, I would want to use some interesting technologies. I like using GitHub…
Read MoreAdding Support for ES2015 Number Methods to iOS 8
At Build.com, I’m working on an e-commerce app using React Native. React Native allows us to write apps in JavaScript that can run on iOS and Android phones with near native performance. The other day, we received several crash reports from users running iOS 8. All of the reports involved method calls on JavaScript’s global…
Read MoreHandling the “possible EventEmitter memory leak detected” Error in React Native
The project that I’m working on is an e-commerce app for an online retailer, Build.com, built using React Native. React Native is a JavaScript framework that allows you to build cross-platform mobile apps in JavaScript that have near-native performance. While we use Redux to handle the state of our app and its data, occasionally we…
Read MoreHandling a Null Response from an API
I’ve been working with React Native lately, which uses the Fetch API for asynchronously fetching data from web services. Recently, I came across a really strange error. Certain calls (in particular, calls to fetch data for new users) would cause an error, “Unexpected end of JSON”.
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