The 2019 Capgemini research institute’s report published after a research on the use of chat assistants showed a drastic 76% increase in customer satisfaction from organizations where chat assistants where built and incorporated into their services. But how does Dialogflow, a product from Google’s ecosystem, aid developers in building chat assistants and contribute to this quota?
Read more…
Markdown is a powerful markup language that allows editing and formatting in plain text format that can then be parsed and rendered as HTML. It has a declarative syntax that is both powerful and easy to learn for technical and non-technical folks. However, due to the consequential ambiguities in its original specification, there have been a number of distinct flavors (or custom versions) that aim to erase those ambiguities as well as extend the original syntax support. This has led to a steep divergence from what can be parsed and what is rendered. CommonMark aims to provide a standardized specification of Markdown that reflects its real-world usage.
Read more…
Even though the development of a data importer is a complex matter, you don’t want your users’ experience with it to be just as complex or complicated. The second they experience any friction or fault in data onboarding, the chances of them bailing from the software will skyrocket. So, in this post, we’re going to focus on how best to present your data importer to users.
Read more…
Copy docs is a framework that allows product designers and writers to manage their in-product copy in a smart way. In this article, Valeriia Panina shares her experience in how the copy docs technique turned out to be a game changer for her workflow. The copy docs technique was a game changer for Valeriia’s workflow and she’d be happy if it boosts yours, too!
Read more…
In JavaScript, there are two main ways to handle asynchronous code: then/catch (ES6) and async/await (ES7). These syntaxes give us the same underlying functionality, but they affect readability and scope in different ways. In this article, Bret Cameron will show you how one syntax lends itself to maintainable code, while the other puts us on the road to callback hell!
Read more…
With so much going on, it’s nice to have an overview of what’s new at Smashing — all in one place. Read on to find out what’s been keeping the team busy alongside some inspiring community resources that have made it to the top list of our newsletters!
Read more…
The convention when contributing to projects on version control platforms is that there is the main branch containing the functional codebase. Then, there are other branches in which several developers can work on copies of the main to either add a new feature, fix a bug, and so on. If there is any error, it can easily be traced and fixed before integrating the changes into the main branch. It can be time-consuming to go through every single line of code manually looking for errors or bugs — even for a small project. With the help of this tutorial, you can learn how to create a continuous integration workflow for your Node JS REST API by using GitHub Actions as well as how to report test coverage with Coveralls.
Read more…
Data onboarding with a custom-built solution can be a difficult and error-prone process. Now imagine what happens when you increase the complexity, allowing for different file types, more users, varying sources and a greater need for security and compliance. It shouldn’t be up to your software end users to work out the kinks of your data onboarding, nor should your team have to do it. In this post, Suzanne Scacca will look at how Flatfile Concierge deals with this problem.
Read more…
There are hundreds of Figma plugins available as of today, yet the Figma plugin search functionality is pretty basic and at times it can be very difficult to find the right plugin for a certain task. Today, Abel Hancock will take you into an in-depth look at several plugins that can speed up your design workflow.
Note: This article is aimed at user interface designers who use Figma on a daily basis.Read more…
In this article, Aleem Isiaka explains how you can deploy a basic NodeJS application to Heroku, automate and schedule a deployment to run at certain intervals of the day, and use other actions from the Github Actions community.
Read more…