Colby Rabideau

I like podcasts, bread, and javascript.

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Sourdough Episode 1: Starting the Starter

Recently, a friend of mine recommended a new Netflix called Cooked. The third episode, titled “Air”, is all about bread.

If I gave you a bag of flour and water […] you could live on that for a while, but eventually you would die. But if you […] bake it into bread, you could live indefinitely.

— “Air”, Episode 3 Cooked

I never really considered that flour and water are the only necessary ingredients in bread. Maybe there’s a pinch of salt too, but that’s all. The yeast that makes bread bread is in the air all around us. With some flour and water we can cultivate natural yeast into a thick, bubbling bowl of starter and use it to make bread indefinitely. That’s what I hear anyways, so I’m giving it a try.

Sourdough starter on day 0

Following a sourdough starter recipe from the kitchn, I combined the first batch of flour and water earlier tonight. I have to “feed” it every 24 hours for the next five-ish days...

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Custom Formatters for Immutable.js

Immutable.js is great. It helps me write simpler and more efficient React, but debugging code that uses Immutable structures can be a little frustrating.

An Immutable Map logged in the console is pretty hard to read.

Usually I call map.toJS() or map.toString() to get a look at my data. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s certainly less seamless than working with native structures like Objects, Arrays, or ES6 Maps.

Lucky for all of us, there’s an awesome library called immutable-devtools that leverages a new feature in Chrome 47+ called Custom Formatters to print Immutable structures in a human-readable way.

An Immutable Map logged with immutable-devtools is much easier to read.

To get it working, go to the “General” tab of settings page in the Chrome DevTools and check “Enable custom formatters” in the “Console” section.

Check "Enable custom formatters".

Then, add immutable-devtools to your project.

npm install --save-dev immutable-devtools

Finally, install the formatter in your project’s JavaScript entry point.

import
...

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