We developers often find ourselves faced with a problem that seems general enough and common enough that someone else could have already developed a solution for it. But what if an existing solution does not exist?

I recently open sourced an ESLint plugin for OkCupid called eslint-plugin-i18n-lingui. The plugin is an extension for ESLint’s core static code analysis rules that enforces localization best practices by catching and fixing errors during development. The best practice rules were inspired by the learning pains from our efforts to localize our website.

This post will discuss why we developed our own ESLint plugin, why we open sourced it, and the steps I took to open source a ESLint plugin.

Although this post will not discuss the localization best practices that eslint-plugin-i18n-lingui enforces or how to create an ESLint plugin, keep an eye out for future posts written specifically about these!

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This post is part of the Web Developer Playbook series, which are created to provide examples, best practice, and suggestions for designing and building web services. I will be using libraries from the JavaScript ecosystem (e.g., Node.js, React.js) in all my examples.

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Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a software design pattern that allows you to think about problems in terms of objects and their interactions. OOP is typically done with classes or with prototypes. Most languages that implement OOP (e.g., Java, C++, Ruby, Python) use class-based inheritance. JavaScript implements OOP via Prototypal inheritance. In this article, I’m going to show you how to use both approaches for OOP in JavaScript, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches of OOP and introduce an alternative for OOP for designing more modular and scalable applications.

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What I love most about programming is the problem solving. I don’t believe anyone is born with problem solving skills. It’s a muscle that is built and sustained by repeated exercise. Like any exercise, there’s a set of guidelines to help you be more effective at developing your problem solving muscles. I will introduce 5 of the most important software design principles that have guided my problem solving process and show you how to apply these principles to solve a real problem.

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Xiaoyun Yang

Software Engineer. Climber. Snowboarder.

Software Engineer

New York