Tables are everywhere. Even if the web (thankfully) moved away from using tables to layout sites, you will still find tables in many places. Many lists are built from tables. User grids, preferences, favorites, feeds, etc. Because tables are everywhere, you, as a React developer, will find yourself doing one of two things: Using a library to build tables or manually building your own. If you fall into the latter category, this post is for you.

We’re going to create a custom, reusable table component in React. In order to do so, we need to establish some high-level goals. …

We’re excited to announce a major release that has been in the planning stages for a long time. We’re introducing a new way to generate API keys that will give you far more control over the apps you build with Pinata.

I won’t keep you waiting. Let’s dive in.

Scoped API Keys

If you build products in the blockchain space, you invariably run into that moment when you realize you have to write code AGAINST the blockchain. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean writing transactions on a mainnet and spending real gas or transaction fees. In all systems, there are testnets you can write code against. Unfortunately, testing against a testnet is still sort of like testing against production. The stakes are lower, but the latency is still there.

Enter local blockchains.

Ethereum developers have developed apps against a local version of the Ethereum blockchain for years now. But for emerging blockchains the local blockchain experience, while generally serviceable, leaves a lot to be desired. This is the exact reason Truffle built Ganache for Ethereum. …

The ERC-721 standard has given rise to the non-fungible token (NFT) market on Ethereum. ERC-721 is a standard for creating an NFT—a complicated way of saying “unique items”. Any unique thing can be an NFT. A house, a baseball card, a piece of art, etc. But the power is not in the item just being unique and digitized. The power is in verifiability. That’s where the ERC-721 standard shines.

The problem with creating ERC-721 tokens comes from storing the underlying assets. Blockchains are not great for storing large pieces of data. …

Whenever I bring the concept up with friends (including developer friends), they tend not to understand what the benefits of PWAs are or why any users would ever use a PWA over the traditional web browser they know and love (or maybe hate).

My answers to the confusions surrounding PWAs are numerous, but I want to try to use some practical examples to explain why I think PWAs will save the open web even as we see walled gardens raising their walls higher by the day.

Case Study in Anti-Competitive Practices

You may have heard of the “epic” battle being waged in courts between Epic Games and Apple. If not, the tl;dr is Epic Games no longer wants to pay Apple 30% of the proceeds they receive from players who purchase their in-game currency on iOS devices. Epic released an in-game payment system on iOS that bypassed Apple’s payment system, and, very expectedly, they got banned. They did the same thing on Android devices, and they were subsequently banned on Android too. Epic used the bans as a springboard to file anti-trust lawsuits against both Google and Apple. …

When building a video game in JavaScript, or doing anything requiring animations beyond the normal capabilities of CSS transitions and keyframes, most people turn to the canvas element. It’s a versatile element that allows you to draw arbitrary shapes and images in both 2d and 3d. This is why almost every HTML5 game uses the canvas element. However, you may find yourself needing to build animations without canvas just as I found myself needing to do. Let’s dive into how we go about that, but first a quick explanation on why.

In my case, I was building a game that has to be 13kb or less as part of the JS13K game competition. It’s possible, of course, to do this with canvas. However, I found that when using the canvas element, you end up writing a lot more code than you would with normal DOM manipulation. In a competition where every byte counts, the less code you have to write, the better. …

The paradigm shift enabled by Web3, whether you define Web3 as blockchain-based or distributed-systems-based, is powerful. It tries to solve many of the problems Web2 created. Technology was the thing that was supposed to unlock power for everyone and connect the world. It has largely done that, but it also re-centralized problems.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon have hoarded data, sold data, and exposed a major flaw in the way we interact with the web — lack of privacy. As we rebuild the web through Web3, we don’t want to make the same mistakes as Web2. At the same time, it would be foolish not to understand and implement some of the things that made Web2 so freeing and so powerful. …

This is part of a series of interviews with founders and builders in the Web3 space called the Web3 Growth Handbook. The official handbook will be released in the coming months, but you can read all of the other available interviews here.