Javascript

Docker: The Secret Weapon for Cloud Efficiency with Kyle Tryon

Published Sep 17, 2024

Updated Dec 11, 2024

1 min read

Rob Ocel, Tracy Lee, Adam Rackis, and Danny Thompson sit down with Kyle Tryon, Senior Developer Advocate at Depot, to talk all things Docker, dev containers, and modern build systems. They break down how Docker simplifies development by solving those "it works on my machine" problems, how cloud-based caching speeds up builds, and why tools like Kubernetes are becoming essential for scaling modern apps. Kyle also shares his journey from fixing laptops in retail to becoming a leading voice in the dev space, plus some great insights into how Docker and Depot are changing the game for developers everywhere.

Chapters 1: Introductions (00:00 – 02:40) 2: What is Docker and Why It Matters (02:41 – 06:30) 3: Docker Files and Containers 101 (06:31 – 11:00) 4: Challenges of Environment Setup & Dev Containers (11:01 – 15:00) 5: The Power of Layer Caching in Docker (15:01 – 20:30) 6: Introduction to Depot and Cloud-Based Builds (20:31 – 25:00) 7: Optimizing Docker Builds with Depot (25:01 – 30:00) 8: Docker in the Modern Web Stack (30:01 – 35:00) 9: The Future of Cloud Builds and CI/CD Pipelines (35:01 – 40:00) 10: Final Thoughts and Where to Find More (40:01 – End)

Follow Kyle Tryon on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/TechSquidTV Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-tryon/ Github: https://github.com/techsquidtv

Exploring Angular Forms: A New Alternative with Signals

Exploring Angular Forms: A New Alternative with Signals In the world of Angular, forms are essential for user interaction, whether you're crafting a simple login page or a more complex user profile interface. Angular traditionally offers two primary approaches: template-driven forms and reactive forms. In my previous series on Angular Reactive Forms, I explored how to harness reactive forms' power to manage complex logic, create dynamic forms, and build custom form controls. A new tool for managing reactivity - signals - has been introduced in version 16 of Angular and has been the focus of Angular maintainers ever since, becoming stable with version 17. Signals allow you to handle state changes declaratively, offering an exciting alternative that combines the simplicity of template-driven forms with the robust reactivity of reactive forms. This article will examine how signals can add reactivity to both simple and complex forms in Angular. Recap: Angular Forms Approaches Before diving into the topic of enhancing template-driven forms with signals, let’s quickly recap Angular's traditional forms approaches: 1. Template-Driven Forms: Defined directly in the HTML template using directives like ngModel, these forms are easy to set up and are ideal for simple forms. However, they may not provide the fine-grained control required for more complex scenarios. Here's a minimal example of a template-driven form: ` ` 2. Reactive Forms: Managed programmatically in the component class using Angular's FormGroup, FormControl, and FormArray classes; reactive forms offer granular control over form state and validation. This approach is well-suited for complex forms, as my previous articles on Angular Reactive Forms discussed. And here's a minimal example of a reactive form: ` ` Introducing Signals as a New Way to Handle Form Reactivity With the release of Angular 16, signals have emerged as a new way to manage reactivity. Signals provide a declarative approach to state management, making your code more predictable and easier to understand. When applied to forms, signals can enhance the simplicity of template-driven forms while offering the reactivity and control typically associated with reactive forms. Let’s explore how signals can be used in both simple and complex form scenarios. Example 1: A Simple Template-Driven Form with Signals Consider a basic login form. Typically, this would be implemented using template-driven forms like this: ` ` This approach works well for simple forms, but by introducing signals, we can keep the simplicity while adding reactive capabilities: ` ` In this example, the form fields are defined as signals, allowing for reactive updates whenever the form state changes. The formValue signal provides a computed value that reflects the current state of the form. This approach offers a more declarative way to manage form state and reactivity, combining the simplicity of template-driven forms with the power of signals. You may be tempted to define the form directly as an object inside a signal. While such an approach may seem more concise, typing into the individual fields does not dispatch reactivity updates, which is usually a deal breaker. Here’s an example StackBlitz with a component suffering from such an issue: Therefore, if you'd like to react to changes in the form fields, it's better to define each field as a separate signal. By defining each form field as a separate signal, you ensure that changes to individual fields trigger reactivity updates correctly. Example 2: A Complex Form with Signals You may see little benefit in using signals for simple forms like the login form above, but they truly shine when handling more complex forms. Let's explore a more intricate scenario - a user profile form that includes fields like firstName, lastName, email, phoneNumbers, and address. The phoneNumbers field is dynamic, allowing users to add or remove phone numbers as needed. Here's how this form might be defined using signals: ` > Notice that the phoneNumbers field is defined as a signal of an array of signals. This structure allows us to track changes to individual phone numbers and update the form state reactively. The addPhoneNumber and removePhoneNumber methods update the phoneNumbers signal array, triggering reactivity updates in the form. ` > In the template, we use the phoneNumbers signal array to dynamically render the phone number input fields. The addPhoneNumber and removePhoneNumber methods allow users to reactively add or remove phone numbers, updating the form state. Notice the usage of the track function, which is necessary to ensure that the ngFor directive tracks changes to the phoneNumbers array correctly. Here's a StackBlitz demo of the complex form example for you to play around with: Validating Forms with Signals Validation is critical to any form, ensuring that user input meets the required criteria before submission. With signals, validation can be handled in a reactive and declarative manner. In the complex form example above, we've implemented a computed signal called formValid, which checks whether all fields meet specific validation criteria. The validation logic can easily be customized to accommodate different rules, such as checking for valid email formats or ensuring that all required fields are filled out. Using signals for validation allows you to create more maintainable and testable code, as the validation rules are clearly defined and react automatically to changes in form fields. It can even be abstracted into a separate utility to make it reusable across different forms. In the complex form example, the formValid signal ensures that all required fields are filled and validates the email and phone numbers format. This approach to validation is a bit simple and needs to be better connected to the actual form fields. While it will work for many use cases, in some cases, you might want to wait until explicit "signal forms" support is added to Angular. Tim Deschryver started implementing some abstractions around signal forms, including validation and wrote an article about it. Let's see if something like this will be added to Angular in the future. Why Use Signals in Angular Forms? The adoption of signals in Angular provides a powerful new way to manage form state and reactivity. Signals offer a flexible, declarative approach that can simplify complex form handling by combining the strengths of template-driven forms and reactive forms. Here are some key benefits of using signals in Angular forms: 1. Declarative State Management: Signals allow you to define form fields and computed values declaratively, making your code more predictable and easier to understand. 2. Reactivity: Signals provide reactive updates to form fields, ensuring that changes to the form state trigger reactivity updates automatically. 3. Granular Control: Signals allow you to define form fields at a granular level, enabling fine-grained control over form state and validation. 4. Dynamic Forms: Signals can be used to create dynamic forms with fields that can be added or removed dynamically, providing a flexible way to handle complex form scenarios. 5. Simplicity: Signals can offer a simpler, more concise way to manage form states than traditional reactive forms, making building and maintaining complex forms easier. Conclusion In my previous articles, we explored the powerful features of Angular reactive forms, from dynamic form construction to custom form controls. With the introduction of signals, Angular developers have a new tool that merges the simplicity of template-driven forms with the reactivity of reactive forms. While many use cases warrant Reactive Forms, signals provide a fresh, powerful alternative for managing form state in Angular applications requiring a more straightforward, declarative approach. As Angular continues to evolve, experimenting with these new features will help you build more maintainable, performant applications. Happy coding!...

Oct 4, 2024

5 mins

AngularJavaScript

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use Dialogs are a common component added to applications, whether on the web or in native applications. Traditionally there has not been a standard way of implementing these on the web, resulting in many ad-hoc implementations that don’t act consistently across different web applications. Often, commonly expected features are missing from dialogs due to the complexity of implementing them. However, web browsers now offer a standard dialog element. Why use the dialog element? The native dialog element streamlines the implementation of dialogs, modals, and other kinds of non-modal dialogs. It does this by implementing many of the features needed by dialogs for you that are already baked into the browser. This is helpful as it reduces the burden on the developer when making their applications accessible by ensuring that user expectations concerning interaction are met, and it can also potentially simplify the implementation of dialogs in general. Basic usage Adding a dialog using the new tag can be achieved with just a few lines of code. ` However, adding the dialog alone won’t do anything to the page. It will show up only once you call the .showModal() method against it. ` Then if you want to close it you can call the .close() method on the dialog, or press the escape key to close it, just like most other modals work. Also, note how a backdrop appears that darkens the rest of the page and prevents you from interacting with it. Neat! Accessibility and focus management Correctly handling focus is important when making your web applications accessible to all users. Typically you have to move the current focus to the active dialog when showing them, but with the dialog element that’s done for you. By default, the focus will be set on the first focusable element in the dialog. You can optionally change which element receives focus first by setting the autofocus attribute on the element you want the focus to start on, as seen in the previous example where that attribute was added to the close element. Using the .showModal() method to open the dialog also implicitly adds the dialog ARIA role to the dialog element. This helps screen readers understand that a modal has appeared and the screen so it can act accordingly. Adding forms to dialogs Forms can also be added to dialogs, and there’s even a special method value for them. If you add a element with the method set to dialog then the form will have some different behaviors that differ from the standard get and post form methods. First off, no external HTTP request will be made with this new method. What will happen instead is that when the form gets submitted, the returnValue property on the form element will be set to the value of the submit button in the form. So given this example form: ` The form element with the example-form id will have its returnValue set to Submit. In addition to that, the dialog will close immediately after the submit event is done being handled, though not before automatic form validation is done. If this fails then the invalid event will be emitted. You may have already noticed one caveat to all of this. You might not want the form to close automatically when the submit handler is done running. If you perform an asynchronous request with an API or server you may want to wait for a response and show any errors that occur before dismissing the dialog. In this case, you can call event.preventDefault() in the submit event listener like so: ` Once your desired response comes back from the server, you can close it manually by using the .close() method on the dialog. Enhancing the backdrop The backdrop behind the dialog is a mostly translucent gray background by default. However, that backdrop is fully customizable using the ::backdrop pseudo-element. With it, you can set a background-color to any value you want, including gradients, images, etc. You may also want to make clicking the backdrop dismiss the modal, as this is a commonly implemented feature of them. By default, the <dialog> element doesn’t do this for us. There are a couple of changes that we can make to the dialog to get this working. First, an event listener is needed so that we know when the user clicks away from the dialog. ` Alone this event listener looks strange. It appears to dismiss the dialog whenever the dialog is clicked, not the backdrop. That’s the opposite of what we want to do. Unfortunately, you cannot listen for a click event on the backdrop as it is considered to be part of the dialog itself. Adding this event listener by itself will effectively make clicking anywhere on the page dismiss the dialog. To correct for this we need to wrap the contents of the dialog content with another element that will effectively mask the dialog and receive the click instead. A simple element can do! ` Even this isn’t perfect though as the contents of the div may have elements with margins in them that will push the div down, resulting in clicks close to the edges of the dialog to dismiss it. This can be resolved by adding a couple of styles the the wrapping div that will make the margin stay contained within the wrapper element. The dialog element itself also has some default padding that will exacerbate this issue. ` The wrapping div can be made into an inline-block element to contain the margin, and by moving the padding from the parent dialog to the wrapper, clicks made in the padded portions of the dialog will now interact with the wrapper element instead ensuring it won’t be dismissed. Conclusion Using the dialog element offers significant advantages for creating dialogs and modals by simplifying implementation with reasonable default behavior, enhancing accessibility for users that need assistive technologies such as screen readers by using automatic ARIA role assignment, tailored support for form elements, and flexible styling options....

Oct 25, 2024

4 mins

HTMLJavaScript

“ChatGPT knows me pretty well… but it drew me as a white man with a man bun.” – Angie Jones on AI Bias, DevRel, and Block’s new open source AI agent “goose”

Angie Jones is a veteran innovator, educator, and inventor with over twenty years of industry experience and twenty-seven digital technology patents both domestically and internationally. As the VP of Developer Relations at Block, she facilitates developer training and enablement, delivering tools for developer users and open source contributors. However, her educational work doesn’t end with her day job. She is also a contributor to multiple books examining the intersection of technology and career, including *DevOps: Implementing Cultural Change*, and *97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know*, and is an active speaker in the global developer conference circuit. With the release of Block’s new open source AI agent “goose”, Angie drives conversations around AI’s role in developer productivity, ethical practices, and the application of intelligent tooling. We had the chance to talk with her about the evolution of DevRel, what makes a great leader, emergent data governance practices, women who are crushing it right now in the industry, and more: Developer Advocacy is Mainstream A decade ago, Developer Relations (DevRel) wasn’t the established field it is today. It was often called Developer Evangelism, and fewer companies saw the value in having engineers speak directly to other engineers. > “Developer Relations was more of a niche space. It’s become much more mainstream these days with pretty much every developer-focused company realizing that the best way to reach developers is with their peers.” That shift has opened up more opportunities for engineers who enjoy teaching, community-building, and breaking down complex technical concepts. But because DevRel straddles multiple functions, its place within an organization remains up for debate—should it sit within Engineering, Product, Marketing, or even its own department? There’s no single answer, but its cross-functional nature makes it a crucial bridge between technical teams and the developers they serve. Leadership Is Not an Extension of Engineering Excellence Most engineers assume that excelling as an IC is enough to prepare them for leadership, but Angie warns that this is a common misconception. She’s seen firsthand how technical skills don’t always equate to strong leadership abilities—we’ve all worked under leaders who made us wonder *how they got there*. When she was promoted into leadership, Angie was determined not to become one of those leaders: > “This required humility. Acknowledging that while I was an expert in one area, I was a novice in another.” Instead of assuming leadership would come naturally, she took a deliberate approach to learning—taking courses, reading books, and working with executive coaches to build leadership skills the right way. Goose: An Open Source AI Assistant That Works for You At Block, Angie is working on a tool called goose, an open-source AI agent that runs locally on your machine. Unlike many AI assistants that are locked into specific platforms, goose is designed to be fully customizable: > “You can use your LLM of choice and integrate it with any API through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).” That flexibility means goose can be tailored to fit developers’ workflows. Angie gives an example of what this looks like in action: > “Goose, take this Figma file and build out all of the components for it. Check them into a new GitHub repo called @org/design-components and send a message to the #design channel in Slack informing them of the changes.” And just like that, it’s done— no manual intervention required. The Future of Data Governance As AI adoption accelerates, data governance has become a top priority for companies. Strong governance requires clear policies, security measures, and accountability. Angie points out that organizations are already making moves in this space: > “Cisco recently launched a product called AI Defense to help organizations enhance their data governance frameworks and ensure that AI deployments align with established data policies and compliance requirements.” According to Angie, in the next five years, we can expect more structured frameworks around AI data usage, especially as businesses navigate privacy concerns and regulatory compliance. Bias in AI Career Tools: Helping or Hurting? AI-powered resume screeners and promotion predictors are becoming more common in hiring, but are they helping or hurting underrepresented groups? Angie’s own experience with AI bias was eye-opening: > “I use ChatGPT every day. It knows me pretty well. I asked it to draw a picture of what it thinks my current life looks like, and it drew me as a white male (with a man bun).” When she called it out, the AI responded: > “No, I don’t picture you that way at all, but it sounds like the illustration might’ve leaned into the tech stereotype aesthetic a little too much.” This illustrates a bigger problem— AI often reflects human biases at scale. However, there are emerging solutions, such as identity masking, which removes names, race, and gender markers so that only skills are evaluated. > “In scenarios like this, minorities are given a fairer shot.” It’s a step toward a more equitable hiring process, but it also surfaces the need for constant vigilance in AI development to prevent harmful biases. Women at the Forefront of AI Innovation While AI is reshaping nearly every industry, women are playing a leading role in its development. Angie highlights several technologists: > “I’m so proud to see women are already at the forefront of AI innovation. I see amazing women leading AI research, training, and development such as Mira Murati, Timnit Gebru, Joelle Pineau, Meredith Whittaker, and even Block’s own VP of Data & AI, Jackie Brosamer.” These women are influencing not just the technical advancements in AI but also the ethical considerations that come with it. Connect with Angie Angie Jones is an undeniable pillar of the online JavaScript community, and it isn’t hard to connect with her! You can find Angie on X (Twitter), Linkedin, or on her personal site (where you can also access her free Linkedin Courses). Learn more about goose by Block....

Mar 13, 2025

4 mins

DevRelEngineering LeadershipAI

Integrating Playwright Tests into Your GitHub Workflow with Vercel

Vercel previews offer a great way to test PRs for a project. They have a predefined environment and don’t require any additional setup work from the reviewer to test changes quickly. Many projects also use end-to-end tests with Playwright as part of the review process to ensure that no regressions slip uncaught. Usually, workflows configure Playwright to run against a project running on the GitHub action worker itself, maybe with dependencies in Docker containers as well, however, why bother setting that all up and configuring yet another environment for your app to run in when there’s a working preview right there? Not only that, the Vercel preview will be more similar to production as it’s running on the same infrastructure, allowing you to be more confident about the accuracy of your tests. In this article, I’ll show you how you can run Playwright against the Vercel preview associated with a PR. Setting up the Vercel Project To set up a project in Vercel, we first need to have a codebase. I’m going to use the Next.js starter, but you can use whatever you like. What technology stack you use for this project won’t matter, as integrating Playwright with it will be the same experience. You can create a Next.js project with the following command: ` If you’ve selected all of the defaults, you should be able to run npm run dev and navigate to the app at http://localhost:3000. Setting up Playwright We will set up Playwright the standard way and make a few small changes to the configuration and the example test so that they run against our site and not the Playwright site. Setup Playwright in our existing project by running the following command: ` Install all browsers when prompted, and for the workflow question, say no since the one we’re going to use will work differently than the default one. The default workflow doesn’t set up a development server by default, and if that is enabled, it will run on the GitHub action virtual machine instead of against our Vercel deployment. To make Playwright run tests against the Vercel deployment, we’ll need to define a baseUrl in playwright.config.ts and send an additional header called X-Vercel-Protection-Bypass where we'll pass the bypass secret that we generated earlier so that we don’t get blocked from making requests to the deployment. I’ll cover how to add this environment variable to GitHub later. ` Our GitHub workflow will set the DEPLOYMENT_URL environment variable automatically. Now, in tests/example.spec.ts let’s rewrite the tests to work against the Next.js starter that we generated earlier: ` This is similar to the default test provided by Playwright. The main difference is we’re loading pages relative to baseURL instead of Playwright’s website. With that done and your Next.js dev server running, you should be able to run npx playwright test and see 6 passing tests against your local server. Now that the boilerplate is handled let’s get to the interesting part. The Workflow There is a lot going on in the workflow that we’ll be using, so we’ll go through it step by step, starting from the top. At the top of the file, we name the workflow and specify when it will run. ` This workflow will run against new PRs against the default branch and whenever new commits are merged against it. If you only want the workflow to run against PRs, you can remove the push object. Be careful about running workflows against your main branch if the deployment associated with it in Vercel is the production deployment. Some tests might not be safe to run against production such as destructive tests or those that modify customer data. In our simple example, however, this isn’t something to worry about. Installing Playwright in the Virtual Machine Workflows have jobs associated with them, and each job has multiple steps. Our test job takes a few steps to set up our project and install Playwright. ` The actions/checkout@v4 step clones our code since it isn’t available straight out of the gate. After that, we install Node v22 with actions/setup-node@v4, which, at the time of writing this article, is the latest LTS available. The latest LTS version of Node should always work with Playwright. With the project cloned and Node installed, we can install dependencies now. We run npm ci to install packages using the versions specified in the lock file. After our JS dependencies are installed, we have to install dependencies for Playwright now. sudo npx playwright install-deps installs all system dependencies that Playwright needs to work using apt, which is the package manager used by Ubuntu. This command needs to be run as the administrative user since higher privilege is needed to install system packages. Playwright’s dependencies aren’t all available in npm because the browser engines are native code that has native library dependencies that aren’t in the registry. Vercel Preview URL and GitHub Action Await Vercel The next couple of steps is where the magic happens. We need two things to happen to run our tests against the deployment. First, we need the URL of the deployment we want to test. Second, we want to wait until the deployment is ready to go before we run our tests. We have written about this topic before on our blog if you want more information about this step, but we’ll reiterate some of that here. Thankfully, the community has created GitHub actions that allow us to do this called zentered/vercel-preview-url and UnlyEd/github-action-await-vercel. Here is how you can use these actions: ` There are a few things to take note of here. Firstly, some variables need to be set that will differ from project to project. vercel_app in the zentered/vercel-preview-url step needs to be set to the name of your project in Vercel that was created earlier. The other variable that you need is the VERCEL_TOKEN environment variable. You can get this by going to Vercel > Account Settings > Tokens and creating a token in the form that appears. For the scope, select the account that has your project. To put VERCEL_TOKEN into GitHub, navigate to your repo, go to Settings > Secrets and variables > Actions and add it to Repository secrets. We should also add VERCEL_AUTOMATION_BYPASS_SECRETl. In Vercel, go to your project then navigate to Settings > Deployment Protection > Protection Bypass for Automation. From here you can add the secret, copy it to your clipboard, and put it in your GitHub action environment variables just like we did with VERCEL_TOKEN. With the variables taken care of, let’s take a look at how these two steps work together. You will notice that the zentered/vercel-preview-url step has an ID set to vercel_preview_url. We need this so we can pass the URL we receive to the UnlyEd/github-action-await-vercel action, as it needs a URL to know which deployment to wait on. Running Playwright After the last steps we just added, our deployment should be ready to go, and we can run our tests! The following steps will run the Playwright tests against the deployment and save the results to GitHub: ` In the first step, where we run the tests, we pass in the environment variables needed by our Playwright configuration that’s stored in playwright.config.ts. DEPLOYMENT_URL uses the Vercel deployment URL we got in an earlier step, and VERCEL_AUTOMATION_BYPASS_SECRET gets passed the secret with the same name directly from the GitHub secret store. The second step uploads a report of how the tests did to GitHub, regardless of whether they’ve passed or failed. If you need to access these reports, you can find them in the GitHub action log. There will be a link in the last step that will allow you to download a zip file. Once this workflow is in the default branch, it should start working for all new PRs! It’s important to note that this won’t work for forked PRs unless they are explicitly approved, as that’s a potential security hazard that can lead to secrets being leaked. You can read more about this in the GitHub documentation. One Caveat There’s one caveat that is worth mentioning with this approach, which is latency. Since your application is being served by Vercel and not locally on the GitHub action instance itself, there will be longer round-trips to it. This could result in your tests taking longer to execute. How much latency there is can vary based on what region your runner ends up being hosted in and whether the pages you’re loading are served from the edge or not. Conclusion Running your Playwright tests against Vercel preview deployments provides a robust way of running your tests against new code in an environment that more closely aligns with production. Doing this also eliminates the need to create and maintain a 2nd test environment under which your project needs to work....

Feb 25, 2025

7 mins

VercelPlaywrightGitHub

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Docker: The Secret Weapon for Cloud Efficiency with Kyle Tryon

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Exploring Angular Forms: A New Alternative with Signals

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

“ChatGPT knows me pretty well… but it drew me as a white man with a man bun.” – Angie Jones on AI Bias, DevRel, and Block’s new open source AI agent “goose”

Integrating Playwright Tests into Your GitHub Workflow with Vercel

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Exploring Angular Forms: A New Alternative with Signals

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

“ChatGPT knows me pretty well… but it drew me as a white man with a man bun.” – Angie Jones on AI Bias, DevRel, and Block’s new open source AI agent “goose”

Integrating Playwright Tests into Your GitHub Workflow with Vercel