Semantic versioning is a formal convention for determining the version number of new software releases. The standard helps software users to understand the severity of changes in each new distribution.

GitLab’s Merge Requests are your chance to review code before it enters your project’s main branch. A Merge Request (MR) is a wrapper around a git merge operation that’s accessible within the GitLab web UI. Once you’ve reviewed your code, you can initiate the merge with a single click. Adopting an MR-driven workflow helps you guarantee code quality by creating an expectation that all commits are thoroughly reviewed.

Running background tasks on a schedule is a standard requirement of backend services. Getting setup used to be simple – you’d define your tasks in your server’s crontab and call it a day. Let’s look at how you can utilise cron while using Docker for deployment.

React has a component-based architecture that encourages you to split your codebase into reusable units of functionality. Not all components are created equal though. Let’s look at the differences between two common types, Presentational and Container (also known as “Stateful”) components.