Mark Biek
Senior Back End Developer
In Mark’s two decades of development experience, he has constantly challenged the typical perception of what a “programmer” is and how they fit into an organization. As our Senior Developer, he leads the development team while also working directly with clients to specify and execute custom development solutions for problems big and small.
Using React and Redux to build the Kentucky Performing Arts ticketing experience
By: Mark Biek
When planning the KPA ticketing app, the first big decision was deciding which technology stack to use _______ Given the complex and highly-interactive design, we needed something that was going to be developer-friendly while letting us build an application that was highly responsive to user interactions. Nothing’s more frustrating than a slow user interface! VIA has mostly standardized on ReactJS for smaller interactive user experiences as well as single-page web applications so it seemed like a great fit, even though the ticketing app is just a small (but critical!) piece of a much larger site.
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Dive into the Sanity Structure Builder
By: Mark Biek
Sanity is the super fast, super customizable CMS that we're using as the backend for the new via.studio website. One of the more powerful concepts that Sanity is the Structure Builder which gives you the ability to customize how content is presented in the Sanity admin.
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Works and Plays Well with Others
By: Mark Biek
In our line of work, there are a lot of different ways a development project can happen. Typically, clients rely 100% on our skills, knowledge, expertise and capacity to get their project done - but sometimes, we get the chance to collaborate with another team - an opportunity we love! We build something Most of the time, a client has a technical need that they wouldn't be able to do themselves.
Read More »Pitfalls of Custom Development
By: Mark Biek
There is a very well known concept in development circles called Not invented here syndrome or NIH. It describes a developer’s tendency to write something from scratch when there is an existing solution they could use instead.
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A custom ecommerce experience with Shopify
By: Mark Biek
Why Shopify? Shopify is one of our favorite hosted ecommerce platforms. It does a great job of making it easy to manage products, product variants, coupons, refunds, etc etc etc.
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Hosting a ReactJS app (with routing) on AWS S3
By: Mark Biek
As you may or may not already know, it’s super simple to host a static website from an AWS S3 bucket. It’s fast, cheap, and you can even use a custom domain.
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React Higher-Order Components (HOC)
By: Mark Biek
What is a higher-order component in React? The official definition is: A higher-order component is a function that takes a component and returns a new component. Whereas a component transforms props into UI, a higher-order component transforms a component into another component.
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Programmatically Controlling Events Calendar Pro
By: Mark Biek
If you’re not familiar with The Events Calendar Pro from Modern Tribe, it’s amazing and part of standard install when building a WordPress site. Note: We’re not in business with Modern Tribe.
Read More »A very basic intro to React redux-saga
By: Mark Biek
Today, we’re going to do a very brief introduction to Redux-Saga and why it makes React+Redux apps much easier. To save space, we’ll only be showing the important bits of our app code.
Read More »Powering up the WordPress Admin with React
By: Mark Biek
Custom post-types are part of the bread & butter of WordPress. We use them everywhere for things like products, events, or just about anything else needing special treatment.
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