Alejandro Celaya | Blog

Recently, I migrated this very blog to Astro, and I took the opportunity to modernize the search system. I was then using lunr, which was a bit unmaintained, and not playing well with modern build tools. Introducing fuse.js Looking for alternatives I found fuse.js, a fuzzy-search library, with zero …

Context Around four years ago, I started to use Next.js in some projects, including this blog. These projects were not applications, but simple landing pages and documentation sites, where content written in markdown was a first class citizen. I remember that I was looking for a modern static site g…

I have always struggled with how packages are versioned and published to the npm registry. My main concern is that you probably want to also add a git tag to your source code when you are releasing a new version, but npm packages have their own versioning system, and include a "version" field in the…

A couple of weeks ago I migrated a React project using redux to Redux Toolkit. Redux has always been my preferred state management tool for React (which doesn't mean I "love" it), but one of its main problems is the amount of boilerplate code it requires. Because of that I had a couple of helper fun…

In 2019, GitHub published their own solution to run automated workflows called GitHub Actions, which allowed those hosting their code in GitHub, to be able to define and run their CI/CD pipelines in the same platform. When it was released, one of the main pain points to use it was that defining pipe…

Recently ReactJS v18 was released. I started to look into its improvements, and checked which of my projects could benefit from them. The main react-based project I maintain at the moment of writing this article is shlink-web-client, so I naturally created a new branch and started the process. The u…

In the last couple of days I have been playing around with the idea of combining GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages to be able to dynamically build preview environments every time a pull request is opened against a repository hosting a client-side web app. The idea is that you can quickly preview the c…

Two days ago I released the first major version in almost 2 years for shlink-web-client, a web UI for shlink, my self-hosted URL shortener. This new version introduces several improvements to the project, and I thought it was worth writing a post to explain all of them in depth. New design The proje…

Some of you know that I work now as a full stack javascript developer, and I have interacted with a few different projects, both in front-end javascript and in nodejs. My main concern about javascript has been that, apparently, the community has not adopted one of the practices that, for me, has bee…

I'm sure you are familiar with those "remember me" checkboxes in login forms. They are a common way to allow a user to keep his/her session in a web application for an extended period of time when he is in a trusted computer. One could think that it is a small and easy-to-implement feature, but it h…