Articles by Ty Lewis

Decoding and Encoding Base64 VLQs in Source Maps

August 22, 2019 Ty Lewis 3 Comments

If you ever need to write some code to read a source map, then you should probably start by trying to find a good library to do it for you. If for some reason you still need to write your own source map reader, then at some point you will…

“Seeing” Angular Change Detection in Action Part II: OnPush, Observables, and the Async Pipe

July 2, 2018 Ty Lewis 1 Comment

In my last change detection post, we looked at an Angular demo where the central component rendered its own component tree as a literal tree graph, with nodes and edges and whatnot. That demo allowed us to visually follow the change detection system’s path through an actual component tree as…

Base64 Encoding: A Visual Explanation

October 23, 2017 Ty Lewis 8 Comments

Base64 encoding appears here and there in web development. Perhaps its most familiar usage is in HTML image tags when we inline our image data (more on this later):

Angular 2 Change Detection: “Seeing” It in Action

January 18, 2017 Ty Lewis 12 Comments

The Angular 2 change detection system is somewhat of a black box: you update some variables in the model, and the components update automatically. Thoughtram, Victor Savkin, and other websites have written some excellent posts explaining change detection (which we reference in this post). Often, these posts present a series…

Building Angular 2 Components on the Fly: A Dialog Box Example

July 19, 2016 Ty Lewis 39 Comments

UPDATE 8-22-16: This post has been updated to use Angular 2 version 2.0.0-rc.5. It was originally written against the API provided by Angular 2 version 2.0.0-rc.4, but as Tom Nurkkala pointed out in the comments, the relevant API from version 2.0.0-rc.4 has been deprecated. UPDATE 9-24-16: A more succinct variation…