Development

Alerts tend to be for sticky messages that I want to ensure the user must actively engage and dismiss. Toasts, on the other hand, are used for quick, something-happened style messages - the information is there for the user to pay attention to, or not, as the message will disappear on its own in a few seconds.

Timely and relevant feedback from application events is critical to maintaining user engagement. Two standard ways of delivering immediate event feedback are through the use of alerts and toast messages. To avoid a lot of boilerplate markup popping up all over the project I wanted to make it as simple as just dispatching an action such as “dispatch(errorAlert('your call cannot be completed as dialed');” and have the alert appear on the screen.

I have finally made the decision to let go of one of my favorite NPM packages, Axios, in favor of modern browsers' Fetch API. I want to be clear up front - I find nothing wrong with Axios, it is an extremely high quality package and a natural progression having used Angular’s http service that it was originally based upon.

I have a minor peeve, maybe it’s just me, but I really dislike random chunks of configuration cluttering up my package.json file. Project generators offered by the likes of Nest and Create React App still leverage the classic pattern of embedding third party configuration values in the package.