Dominik Ferber

npmstats.org

Curious about how npm's download counts work, I ended up building npmstats.org which lets you view the download history of any package published to npm.

Aside from showing statistics of packages, it can also compare authors. Check out these examples: enzyme vs react-testing-library, the migration from babel-core to @babel/core or the total downloads of my packages

The project ended up more challening than I thought at first. It was a ton of fun nonetheless and I'm very excited to see where Cloudflare Workers are headed.

Test a Render Prop!

enzyme is a hugely popular library for testing React components. While contracting for Commercetools, me and my teammates found it a bit inconvenient to test render props with enzyme - and we had plenty of them after their epic rise in popularity. My coworker Tobi and I built an extension for enzyme which removes the overhead of testing render props called @commercetools-frontend/enzyme-extensions.

I wrote the "Test a Render Prop!" article as a follow-up to the hugely popular "Use a render prop!" article. It is supposed to be the missing testing section of the original.

The developers behind enzyme have since reached out to us and we helped integrate the renderProp test function of enzyme-extensions into the next enzyme release, which I'm very excited about!

Masch

react-native allows React developers to write iOS applications. I was really curious about development of native applications, so I set out to build a mobile game in my spare time. After around three months, the game was completed. I explored a lot more than I initially had set out for. The game featured notifications, group chat, a friend system, camera access and image upload. It was powered by RethinkDB and node.js in the backend.

My highlight was that it got accepted into the App Store. It received a few downloads from friends, and we played plenty of matches together and sent hundreds of messages over the next few months.

Unfortunately, the application is no longer available as I did not continue to pay the fee for the Apple Developer Program. Building the application was a very enriching experience and I learned a lot from it!

Minimal Browser Window

I needed a minimal browser window for a mockup but nothing out there fit my taste, so I created my own. Feel free to download and reuse.

Enabling assets for Server-Side Rendering in Webpack

This aricle shows how to ensure consistent assets paths when using server-side rendering with assets.

I pioneered fake-file-loader, fake-url-loader and fake-style-loader to enable server-side rendering of assets through Webpack. The functionality got replicated in the offical webpack loaders later, which allowed me to deprecate these packages.

Linting Meteor Applications

This article will introduce you to code linting. It shows how linters are useful, how to set them up and how to integrate them into Meteor projects, Continuous Integration and your editor. It also introduces eslint-plugin-meteor, a tool I created specifically for linting Meteor projects.

This was my last big article of the Meteor series. The tool I created, which this article is about, is currently receiving over 20k monthly downloads, and has been downloaded over half a million times in total.

Real-World ES6 Examples in Meteor

This article shows practical examples of how ES6 eases the day-to-day development in Meteor. It helped educate many developers about the new language features. I also gave a spontaneous talk about it at a Meteor meetup in Munich. The article received over 10k views since then.

ES6 in Meteor

JavaScript as we use it today is based on the ECMAScript 5 standard. All commonly used browsers and node.js support it. The next version of ECMAScript (ES) is going to be ES6.

This article shows how to enable new JavaScript features in Meteor. It received almost 15k views since I wrote it in 2015. My goal of this article was to help the Meteor community to adopt ES6.

Meteor Daily

Meteor Daily was a daily digest of everything happening around Meteor. I scraped all related news and published a digest of them almost every day from 8th of August 2014 until 29th of March 2015. The project had over 13k page views since its inception. I eventually stopped using Meteor as I wanted more control over the stack, and so the projected ended as well.

Singapore Blog

When I lived in Singapore in 2014, I blogged about our stay there. I built the blog myself to keep friends and family updated about us.

Development of a Classroom Response System

Many universities use systems to actively involve students during class. In addition to long-established hardware-based CRS, there are more and more web-based solutions being developed, which allow students to participate by using their own smart devices in order to vote on questions asked by their teacher.

In this paper, which was my bachelor thesis, I outline how to develop a web-based Classroom Response System which can be used by professors during lectures.

I also spoke about my learnings of developing a Meteor application at the Munich Node.js User Group meetup.