There’s a JS lib for that

Recently I was creating an app using Angular Material all was going well until I tried to use Flexbox to layout the app.

The app was a demo Employee Manager app, that lists all the employees on the right side of the screen and the edit form on the left side.

I wanted to make the app fully responsive. So I decided to look into using Flexbox. I’ve used Flexbox in an existing app once before, and from what I saw I was really impressed. So I decided that I’d try to implement a Flexbox layout from scratch.

It was all going along well when I tried to implement a layout change so when the app was displayed on mobile/tablet. The list of employees was on top of the edit form. But as this was new to me I thought I’d do some research using Google to see if anyone had written about how they implemented Material and Flexbox.

So in Google, I typed ‘Angular Material Flexbox’ (not Google, you never type Google into Google. As we all know it will destroy the internet if you do that). The results I got for my ‘Angular Material Flexbox’ search was really interesting.

Instead of seeing some articles on how you can use Flexbox within a Material app, instead, it was full of links to GitHub each with a library that you can add to your project that’ll give you Flexbox support along with Angular Material.

Now I’m a fan of GitHub and what it has done for modern web development. But now it seems if you are trying to implement a feature or trying to solve a problem within a project, there are just JS libraries that you can ‘just add’ to your project that’ll fix your problem.

There are no longer articles where people show how they have solved a problem, it’s all pull request, get this library and add it to your project and a few lines of code and the problem is solved.

What happened to articles showing you how you can use what the web provides to solve the problem.