I guess if AI is what it takes to finally get people to care about architecture and team structure then mission accomplished?

Younger engineers keep asking how I prioritize in a chaotic environment. Here's my approach.

A hard-won lesson for ya: Always deploy when you've got lots of traffic.

10 years ago yesterday I moved to America with 1.5 suitcases, ~2k in the bank, a place to crash, and a freelancing client lined up. A few thoughts.

A project is something you do, a product is something you own.

Whenever I talk about sprints, someone mentions Shape Up. So you have 9 week sprints – what's the difference?

For the past few months I've been introducing sprints into a chaotic startup that's been growing so fast everyone's got whiplash. Since August, 5 engineers turned into 12. I think it's starting to work.

Tests may look like slop, but make them clear, not clever. Best practices are key: Test outcomes, not code. Name with intent. Keep tests independent. More straightforward tests beat fewer abstract ones.

I've been using AI to write tests and it works surprisingly well! Here's how.

A few engineering principles I aim to instill in every team I join. Lead or not.

Debate less, ship more.

Products not projects. Outcomes not features. Iterate.

It takes about 3 years to experience the consequences of your own decisions.

Let go of your legos and let others do the work.

The best part about writing is that you get to learn new and exciting ways you were wrong. Databases are smarter than I thought!

You've heard that array or list columns in a database are bad. But why? Yesterday it clicked for me

Turn your unwieldy Flask codebase into manageable, composable fragments with this UI pattern. Very close to HTMX.

Going from Big Vision to Series of Executable Steps is a key skill for senior+ engineers. PMs can help but they don't know everything.

How do you choose what to work on first? As an empowered engineer that's a key skill.

What if your React code could render as a PNG, PDF, static HTML, or fully interactive webapp just by changing the URL? I got a working demo! 😁

Hardcoding logic when you're tight on time doesn't need to make a mess. You can build the abstraction first!

Accelerate is the empirical research behind books such as The Phoenix/Unicorn Project and (parts of) Software Engineering at Google. I loved it.

Task queues have been on my mind lately so here's a little primer on what they are, how they work, and why you need them when your project starts to grow.

Working with AI is here and it's skill. Just like google-fu became important in the mid 2000's. A few things I've learned.

Less talking more doing

Wanna read my hardest engineering lessons learned? You're in luck!

3+1 quick book recommendations to help you think about next year

Life is a hill-climbing algorithm

Without reading their resume, you'll see if a candidate is fresh or has been doing this a while. And you'll know their blind spots and their strengths

Here it is: 20+ years of programming experience distilled into 378 words. From the book I'm writing.

Here's an approach to writing code that I've been using for years and couldn't quite put into words until now. One of those _"This feels wrong but I can't explain why"_. Now I can!

You can't learn to ride a bike from reading a book.

Few of your engineering decisions matter long-term. Software is soft. You can change your mind. But how you structure your components is here to stay.

As long as it works, right?

A coworker asked how React Islands work and I realized it's a technique I've been using to modernize monolithic web codebases for years, but never wrote down how it works.

Pulling modules out of a big ball of mud is like grabbing a slice of cheesy pizza. It's kinda separate but also not really.

Here's a short and sweet story about a Friday deploy. I love Friday deploys.

Here's a doc I like to use to structure the pre-work design chat that makes later code review a breeze.

Forget Gang of Four, here are the 7 architectural patterns real programmers use:

At scale there are no rollbacks and no cut-overs. Your software only moves forward.

Your favorite way of doing things may just be an expression of tech limitations at the time

Why do some projects ship and others seem to drag on forever? You need 3 people to get this right.

Is the job to get things done or to memorize trivia and solve cute coding puzzles?

Why I didn't become a full-time creator/educator

You can't prevent bugs. You'll burn out. Instead focus on making them quick to fix.

Manny Lehman was one of the first to notice that software is never done. It just continues to evolve forever.

The Series A inflection point is the most fun time in a startup, if you ask me. Here's what it looks like

When yaks aren't procrastination, they might be tunnel vision. You're so focused on the right solution, you miss the good enough solution

A small improvement that lands is better than a large improvement stuck in review

A long design phase without shipping kills many software projects. Here's a story from production I haven't shared before.

Quick note today to plant the seed of an idea I've always loved: The Tour of Duty.

5 common themes

Been thinking about what needs to be in place for engineers to ship with confidence

The way you interview changes as you go through your career. If you're grinding leetcode 10 years in, something's wrong.

You can't fix everything. Focus on the next big thing and let the small fires burn.

On my last day at Tia I wrote a master vision doc for our TanStack Router app. Here are the parts I can share.

When you see a unicorn, you gotta hop on

Making small changes in large unfamiliar codebases is the job. That's what engineers do all day.

Yes SQL is super flexible. That is its strenght and its weakness

Never underestimate the power of good marketing for bad products. NoSQL was fun but SQL is here to stay.

Removing a single line of code slashed database CPU usage by 66% 🤘

Swizec reveals the hidden pitfalls of overusing the DRY principle in coding, leading to bad abstractions. Discover how to write adaptable, efficient code that avoids these common traps.

This talk from C3Fest summarizes the key lessons I've learned in the past ~15 years of working in tech startups. It's a high level overview of a new book I'm writing (60% done).

Here's a trap that talented engineers fall into all the time. It creates frustration, burnout, and the genre of tweets that read like "Why don't people care about the amazing work I'm doing".

Here are 6 books I'd buy every engineer who joins my team, if I ran a team. You might like 'em too.

Discover the potential pitfalls of spurious automation and learn a foolproof three-step process to automate any task effectively. Don't miss out on understanding when automation is truly beneficial and when it can become a hindrance.

Not everything needs to work forever. Start by solving the problem

We built an AI algorithm to help you find interesting people to talk to at a conference. And make sure it's not awkward

Decided to publish my notes because they look pretty useful on their own. Although I hope my stage presence adds a little something something. Enjoy :)

All the hard lessons learned using feature flags in production. Skips the why and gets to the how.

A reader asked 'Wtf why does this work?'

Sick of complex states in your code? React Suspense can simplify your components for more readable, robust code!

If you derive tests from your implementation, you can't apply the Beyonce rule. What if the code is wrong and that wasn't the programmer's intent? We'll never know. The bug now exists in both places.

here's war story from last summer. I've talked about it in workshops but haven't written it down before. It's for a book I'm working on.

Many engineering challenges start with your roadmap

effective engineering teams should work *with* their product owner/manager, not *for* them

Doing the work is not the same as getting things done

When working: sync first *then* async

The actor model is now part of everyday tooling and ensures concurrency safety. Understanding the principles behind it helps you write less buggy code.

You can classify software projects into 4 quadrants from trivial to complex

Discover why coding is more like a boxing match, focused on delivering results rather than perfect technique. Learn how to navigate economic upheaval and prioritize business needs in this unexpected comparison.

A shift in your code review process can boost your team's productivity. Empower authors to make the call.

The best engineering books aren't those you read at the start of your career. It's the ones you appreciate 5 years in.

You're doing too much. Sit back, relax, see how people *want* to use the code. THEN build the abstraction.

Generative AI is entering the early adopters phase of Moore's technology cycle. Lots of people have been asking me for the quickest and cheapest way to get started.

Don't get stuck being a critical member of the team.

Team dysfunction where everyone's a soloist? Try this fix: Force the team to work on ONE story at a time.

Ever felt like your software team is just soloists in a trench coat? You may be right!

No amount of growth hacking, investor money, or a/b testing will save you, if people don't want what you have.

Agile is something you are, not something you do.

Is your resume a tech bingo card? Not great.

Talk about today, not yesterday

Books start with a detailed outline that's easy to change. That's when they're easy to change and where you can help.

People are starting to cheat in interviews using ChatGPT. It's obvious, doesn't work, and wouldn't even be cheating if you did it right!

People are starting to cheat in interviews using ChatGPT. It's obvious, doesn't work, and wouldn't even be cheating if you did it right!

The blue sweater scene in 'Devil Wears Prada' is a masterclass in expertise

Cap your down-side and think like an investor. Look for key metrics that can shape your career growth.

Swizec is writing "Scaling Fast", a book about his journey in a 20x hyper-growth startup. Questions?

Unearth the surprising connection between the CIA's Simple Sabotage Manual and your productivity, and learn how to transform tiny actions into big wins. Dive into Swizec's engaging exploration of how small actions can make a huge impact on your progress.

The Buxton Index measures an entity's planning period and explains many of your work dynamics.

TanStack Router puts the router in control of data, state, and UI and it's ... really good.

Making 15 years of blog archives easier to navigate with AI and cosine similarity to build a related articles featur

A reflection on engineering through The Hockeystick

Software engineering salaries come from one of 3 budgets. Which budget pays your salary shapes your day-to-day and influences your career trajectory

A daring adventure of manipulating GET parameters in a NextJS 14 project, pushing hosting limits and avoiding the need for data storage. Dive into the chaos of compressing inputs to keep the project delightfully storage-free.

Wanna see me ride a flamingo wearing a cowboy hat? You're in luck! That was my outfit for a deeply technical talk to 700+ people at React Summit US 2023 🤘

Do Hard Things is a recent book from an author of my favorite book about burnout (Peak Performance). It talks about why our traditional view of toughness is wrong.

I asked engineers how they keep a high quality culture. These are the takeaways

Askers vs Guessers: the culture clash that explains half the conflicts you've ever had

Want an engaged engineering team? Let juniors speak first.

Overtraining won't always get you to the finish line faster. Growth comes in cycles - rest, push hard, recover. Less can be more when it comes to achieving your goals

TypeScript may streamline code navigation and catch semantic errors, but it doesn't guarantee fewer bugs or faster fixes.

Position yourself as an expert and stand out in the job market

Regular software updates may seem tedious, but they save you from the nightmare of a massive overhaul down the line.

Transitioning from Senior to Lead Engineer isn't just about technical prowess, but strategic thinking, soft skills, and going beyond your role. And remember, strong individual contributions matter!

Lessons learned from running GPT-4 on lots of data using the same task.

Understanding the nuances of TypeScript: it adds static types to JavaScript, reducing bugs by checking code validity pre-run. But imagine if we had types at run-time too - validating inputs, enhancing error messages. A dream, but a nice one.

Realizing I'm statistically halfway through life at 36. Time is the one thing you can't get more of

I've been using Bun in a few side-projects and I like it a lot

Dive into this engaging exploration of hands-on learning from pottery to programming. Discover how embracing new experiences can enhance personal growth and improve your coding skills.

AI is the easy part of the equation. The real game changers in #AIEngineering are mastering data engineering, handling non-deterministic outputs, and nailing product development.

Discover tRPC's potential in building end-to-end type safe RPC APIs in this insightful blog post. Perfect for developers seeking innovative solutions for server-client separation in webapp development.

Solve the problem at hand, not the one you imagine might come next. A simple fix now often beats a complex one later.

Better ways to handle situations where the code makes you go O.o

These pics are epic and you should see them

Success in your career doesn't come from relying on the market or job stability. It comes from trusting your own wings - having a clear vision, treating work as a value exchange, leveraging your skills, and owning your path

it's about noticing the rocks that could trip others and taking the initiative to move them

Explore the power of pgvector and Supabase for efficient similarity search in this comprehensive guide. Keep vector data next to your business data for efficient queries and less overhead.

Regular writing is a secret superpower! Sharpens your thoughts, boosts your career, and helps you become an authority in your field. Don't pretend to be an expert, just share your experiences. Your insights are gold

Shared state in programming isn't the enemy, it's unclear dependencies that tangle your code. Keep it clean with explicit state dependencies and strict access guidelines

Lots of readers wrote in with questions and comments about How many years to senior engineer?. Here's some additional thoughts.

Becoming a senior engineer isn't about clocking years, but about depth and breadth of experience. Work in diverse teams, stick with a codebase for 3+ years, and take on projects with real stakes.

Certainty is an illusion, only probabilities are real

Detangling a Big Ball of Mud is hard. You have to find domain boundaries where none exist. Looks like AI can help 🤩

Why are utility files bad? How do you recognize architectural complexity? What the hell is a transitive dependency?

Clean code matters, but it's the architectural complexity that truly impacts your productivity and bug count. Focus on simplifying the system, not just the code.

What if you could focus on the fun _engineering_ part of your job, not on coding? You can!

Unleash the power of 'The Wally Reflector' to manage the influx of 'quick requests' and empower your team.

You can't escape Conway's Law. Might as well use it for good.

A strong partnership with product is key to an enjoyable engineering life

Different lenses, different worlds. Your perspective is shaped by your experiences. Even in debates, all sides can be right in their own context.

Rewriting code isn't a magic fix-all. Consider the opportunity cost, complexity of the old system, and estimation challenges. Instead of stopping all to rewrite or building new while maintaining the old, try incremental improvements and new code adoption.

A few readers wrote in to say that the React Can Update State During Render email last week made no sense. Here's a better explanation.

An unexpected feature of React: updating state during render. It's a UX and performance optimization

Aa few readers wrote in with questions and objections to last week's Ownership makes careers email. Here's a few clarifications.

Own shit. At least put your name on things. Yes, before it's successful.

Delete code when it stops providing value 💡 All code is a liability; context matters. Keep what solves problems, toss the rest.

Discover the magic of HTML5 game development with Game Dev JS Weekly and level up your productivity by eliminating daily frictions with Wonder Tools

Focus on solving problems, not just doing work or writing code. Think creatively, question existing processes, and prioritize effective outcomes

Unravel the hidden costs of architectural complexity in software engineering and learn practical strategies to tackle it. Boost productivity, reduce defects, and improve staff retention with insights from an MIT PhD thesis.

The secret to effective standups that don't suck

Unlock the secret to guiding your career with a powerful positioning statement. Learn to stand out in the job market and attract opportunities that align with your expertise and values.

Unlock your true potential at the Senior Mindset Retreat! 🚀 Develop crucial soft skills for career growth and become the leader the tech world needs. It's not just about coding, it's about teamwork, ownership, and making an impact.

Complicated code slows down junior devs, while complex systems impact senior devs more. Focus on managing system complexity & dependencies, not just simplifying code.

Invest in your career growth. Seize the moment to develop new skills and prepare for a brighter future

Stand out in the job market with a strong positioning statement! Focus on the value you bring to organizations, not just tech skills. Be specific about what you do, for whom, and how.

What do you do with 15 years of your writing history when LLMs hit the scene? A chatbot!

This collaborative approach enhances both people and technical aspects of a team, leading to a more efficient work environment.

Unlock the secrets to combating architectural complexity in software development and learn to identify and fix the wrong abstraction. Boost productivity, reduce bugs, and retain more staff.

eightthings.pdf is the best paper I've read on what's going on in AI right now and why everyone is excited. Here's my summary.

Behind every thriving team is a dedicated manager who shields them from corporate chaos, sacrificing their own well-being for the team's success.

a little case study from an upcoming book I'm writing with Manning about software rewrites

Efficient problem-solving in engineering with a shift in perspective – focusing on user outcomes can lead to innovative solutions and change your approach to system design.

Skills and experience matter more than prestigious schools and employers.

everything people say is bad about modern tech interviews is actually good 🤯

What is the essential difference between DRY and SoC principles in software engineering and how do you balance the two

"AI Woodstock" was a HuggingFace meetup showcasing groundbreaking AI projects and innovations. Here are some of my favs.

Don't worry about the hype, just get some sun, some rest, and remember to hydrate.

20 years ago greybeards laughed at us for Googling. Now they laugh when we ask ChatGPT. But the leverage is 🚀

Behind the scenes of a vendor migration project. What senior+ engineers do so you can focus on the code.

Behind the scenes of a tiny bug that survive 919 days

Don't overthink, just ship

Learn how to build a powerful semantic search engine in just 2 hours with the OpenAI API.

Swiz shares why he's not making the big bucks at a tech giant, from the soul-crushing grind of corporate to the funny money of tech compensation.

A simple change in perspective can help you overcome complex technical challenges and save time on future projects.

You can achieve more with your career by leveraging your experience, advice, and ability to clear blockers, rather than just working hard. This approach of "force multiplying" your team can create more value than working alone

It takes an entire ecosystem to power the backend of a software system! Complex networks of processes, data storage, analytics, and more are often underestimated when looking at a software system from the frontend

NextJS can be used to build browser extensions. This is a novel way of building extensions that allows developers to use familiar tools and technologies. Here's how

Luck is a function of the work you do and how many people know about it? Expand your visibility, take on impactful work, and increase your luck and career capital

Performance lives in the unlikliest of places. Follow the metrics.

Learn why squash merging is your friend - from hating it to loving it! Squash merging helps you keep moving and focus on the work instead of recording the work.

Merging finished work straight to main and deploying to production right away, scales to teams of thousands. This approach is counterintuitive to many engineers who may be used to working on their own

Start coding at the point of least certainty: Learn how to approach projects when there is uncertainty and risk, and why it's beneficial to start with the hardest part first, instead of building a foundation and working up from there. This concept is illustrated through the analogy of training a monkey to jump through a hoop.

For those wanting to stay hands-on, we recommend solving bigger better challenges with higher stakes and new problems.

We look at React's native async support and how to use it in a NextJS 13 app. Learn how to use async components, parallel loading states, and caching with React.js and NextJS 13.

Advice on how to prepare for potential layoffs, how to support friends and colleagues who have been laid off, and how to find a new job after being laid off.

Generative AI has made big strides in recent years. Diffusion models make decent art and modern large language models can out-write even the best college student on a deadline. Over the holidays I tried it out by building an app.

The days are long, but the weeks are short. In the wash of our daily grind, you lose sight of what a year can bring. Or a decade! I like to take a moment around the new year to reflect and make plans

My engineering manager likes to say that he can give advice and warn us before a big mistake, but he can't tell us what to do. He doesn't live with the consequences.

ole Musky bought Twitter and the tech community threw a collective shitfit. The atmosphere of ragequitting, hand wringing, and aloof defiance gave me time to reflect: Why am *I* here?

A founder friend asked me about growing pains on his team. How do you avoid stepping on each other's toes?

Here's an idea that can take the pressure off your career: Yes, you can stay a senior software engineer forever. But how?

When's the last time a piece of tech blew your mind? I tried stable diffusion on my new ipad and wow

Staff Engineer was one of the more impactful books I've read in recent months. Went through the audiobook soon after becoming tech lead so the timing was perfect.

Following up from my article about XState and Stately.ai, fellow reader S. asked if `useReducer` could ever be relevant when using state machines in React code. Yes! Here's how

Two years ago I wrote about using XState after building a UI interaction so twisted my brain leaked out my ears. It helped. Now the creators have made something even better – Stately.ai 😍

A few weeks ago I made tech lead, a type of staff engineer. Here are my thoughts on what that means, how it happened, and why you'd want such a thing.

A painful lesson from production that brought several engineers almost to tears: *Please* add PATCH endpoints to your public APIs.

A way to embed tweets in static sites with full pre-renders and live updates using just 9kB of client-side JavaScript, 2 HTTP requests, and full reader privacy ✌️

Fellow reader Frank writes in with a question about career moves and I thought my answer could help you too

if you've been following tech news lately, things feel ... 😖 Between the layoffs, hiring freezes, investors suddenly caring about revenue, and whatever the heck stock markets are doing, we're in for a rough time. BUT!

When your code feels hard, 9 times out of 10, the problem is with your data model. The signs are subtle.

Great question. Common concern. *What if I get stuck in a technology that isn't hot??* Or worse, burn out re-learning every new thing 😱

In 1970 a paper came out that changed the world of business computing. It laid the ground work for modern databases.

One of my favorite ways to simplify and de-gotcha React code is to rip out all the useCallback and useMemo drama. 90% of the time you don't need it.

how do you catch a critical deadline that cannot be missed? We're talking external stakeholders, millions on the line, and it all hinges on *your* team getting it done on time. No overtime

Wherein I use LEGO to talk about organizing your code for ease of use

Some people like to organize code in files and folders and neat categories. Others love search. When they work together, that's the challenge.

New members on our team invariably say 2 things: 1. Wow I've never seen a team move this fast 2. This approach feels weird. I'm uncomfortable Teams like this are not common.

What does a real image look like? The rise of modern AI photo editing and generation tools makes this an interesting question.

"Your code doesn't matter" is something experienced programmers say, between the lines, when they sound like complete lunatics. But what do they mean? Why does everyone say it?

Chatting about teaching and learning complex technical skills with an engineer I'm mentoring. She's a former chef. We shared the same frustration with online resources.

swizec.com has been around since 2005. For 15 of those years, it's been running Google Analytics to give me a sense of "Is anyone out there?". No more.

If your approach works so well, why isn't every team doing this?

The quickest way to simplify a complex function with lots of logic is to turn it into data. A lesson from production

How do you react when you don't like The Process at work? Most programmers complain on social media, make a wry joke, and ... suffer. Not great

My talk from React Summit is now online, if you're curious. It's about code rewrites in the context of hyper growth startups. The ultimate sin. Or is it 🤔

Keep getting the guilt, that I'm not able to code, just running around for discussions and solving other issues, managing people. Any idea to manage all the fronts and get rid of this guilt?

My favorite mistake to make when I'm in a hurry is to think that I _have to_ build new features the sloppiest way possible. Find the quick fix and move on. But that's not true.

A coworker asked me for tips on how to stay focused during the day. Here's what I said.

In 2015 a group of researchers asked 59 experienced engineers at Microsoft "What makes a great software engineer?". Here's what they found.

Wherein I use a silly example to show why you need more than small reusable single purpose functions to write good software.

How do you stand out as an expert amid tech layoffs?

A critical look at a conference talk that went great but felt a little off.

Programming translates fuzzy understanding into exacting specifications. That’s why it’s hard. The Illusion of Explanatory Depth reigns supreme

You cannot make something good until you understand who you're making it for.

A fun problem for RESTful APIs: Did you get 404 because your URL is wrong or because the resource wasn't found?

it’s the leader, not the team

Writing software is a playful process of exploration and discovery. Like a game of kick the can on a Sunday walk.

Spaghetti code – unstructured Ravioli code – too structured Lasagna code – layered wrong Minestrone software – unclear domains

Microservices are a pain in the ass. They turn every system into a byzantine mess of complexity. But this week ... they saved my butt.

The first in-person conference in years! It was wonderful 🤩 - Remix is great - Serverless at edge is the future - GDPR does not play with 👆

Here's a sneak peek at a new book I'm writing about Refactoring and Rewriting. It's with a publisher so I might get in trouble for sharing this, but it's a first draft ... they own the final version 😛

"Every product org should have a senior+ engineer whose job it is to run around and make everyone else more productive" 🤔 That IS the role of a senior+ engineer

People on twitter loved this trick I learned from a coworker's pull request the other day. You might like it too.

Do you review refactoring pull requests differently than you do others? An empirical study of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, says that you do and finds 6 common criteria.

My entire career I've never seen a sprint finished on time. The new manager said "Oh I think we can fix that" ... 18 months later he proved me wrong

Timing changes everything. Who do you think has better engineers? The team that built Google from 9 million daily searches in 2000 to 1 billion in 2009, or the team that launched Google's 10th chat app last year?

The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures

One of my biggest frustrations since migrating swizec.com from Wordpress to Gatsby was that I never added categories. Always wanted to, never did. Thought it would be super hard. Gatsby made it painless

Lessons from a painful outage with timezones, UTC offsets, and database clients that took a whole week to resolve.

On the backend anything can and will fail. How do you deal with that?

Ever noticed how an expert's job isn't that different from an apprentice's? Yet they can charge way more 🤔

Engineering compensation falls into groups so different that neither group even realizes the others exist. And they fight about it.

Feedback can save an airplane from crashing, or upset everyone around you. But for you personally, honest feedback is the fastest way to become a better engineer. Fixing what you're bad at is where the gains hide.

When you grok state machines, a new world of computational beauty and software design opens in front of your eyes. Things that used to be hard become easy. The impossible becomes possible. And you turn into that annoying team member.

because if you go to bat for the team, the team goes to bat for you

Or how we took an API endpoint from 16s to 3s.

Here's a funny video about Ivane, a construction worker with amazing productivity and work ethic. Imagine what Ivane could do if someone showed him how to use his tools 😱

The longest project of my life

What are system design interviews for anyway?

Every year I ask readers if they're enjoying my newsletter. Then fail to use those responses 😅 This year I said heck it and built a /testimonials page that shows everyone's feedback raw from Typeform. Here's how.

Are you an organizer or a searcher? What about your team?

How can you know you're succeeding if you don't know where you're going?

A story of how my performance hunch was totally wrong and the answer that sped up an AWS Lambda 33%

Brand helps your career in subtle ways.

No it's not a wrong answer or floundering with algorithms. Not even being nervous or shy or having a language barrier. Culture fit is the least of your worries if you make this mistake.

What do you do when every bug you fix creates 5 new bugs? You could laugh and move on, or realize it's a sign of bigger issues

DynamoDB Streams are a convenient way to react to changes in your database. And surprisingly easy to use 🥳

How a focus on long-term games changed my approach to everything and calmed down my life

burnout doesn't work the way you think

The cult of TDD leads you down a dark and stormy path towards brittle code with a false sense of security. But there is a better way. A sweet spot between unit and heavy integration.

What slows you down the most when you're coding or doing software engineering? I think it's how fast you make decisions

If you ever want to build a searchable typeahead field, `<datalist>` can do that for you. On all browsers. Across devices. Standards compliant. With no JavaScript. 🤯

Not all overtime is bad overtime

Every null or undefined check doubles the number of tests you need 😱

wanna see the strangest looping construct I've found in production code?

RESTful APIs are like Agile – everyone does it differently and if it isn't working, it's your fault for doing it wrong. 🤨

Interviews are terrible. Stressful, time-intensive, loosely correlated with on the job performance. They're the least terrible way we have to hire.

The difference in salary between a junior and senior engineer can be orders of magnitude. Many multiples at least. But what's the difference in mindset that gets you there?

Defensive coding is an important lesson and over time and engineers it leads to massive bloat, if you're not careful.

You can use the ergonomics of React Query for any slow operation and it's wonderful.

Erik, the author of Developer Hegemony and founder of Hit Subscribe, invited me to chat about balancing sidehustles and full-time work

JavaScript is a fantastic server-side language because it's async. That also makes it tricky. 💩 What happens when you swallow errors? Forget to resolve promises? Or run into a number of other anti-patterns

React 18 is coming soon. I hope 🤞 Here's a talk I gave exploring its implications and showing off demos with working code.

Today is my birthday which means I've been coding for 25 years. A quarter century 😱 Here's 25 lessons I've learned about code. In no particular order.

Using plain Jest on a TypeScript codebase is kinda rough. No types in tests no thanks. Making Jest and TypeScript work together smoothly is something you do just rarely enough to forget the details. Hope this helps you and future me too ✌️

Engineers *hate it* when you say it doesn't matter how good they are because a team will outcode them any day. But it's true, you can't build something big on your own.

TypeScript solves many of JavaScript's sharpest edges. You don't need much to get started ✌️

Boo meetings, yay code, right? There comes a time in your career when coding is no longer your highest impact contribution. Might even be holding you back. 🙊

Do you solve problems or execute tasks?

A hill I will die on 👉 global CONSTANT = 'constant' are bad

When you're in a company desperately trying to meet demand, *ship*. You'll have money, time, and professionals to fix code later. Even if you start with jQuery.

Last week I went on the PodRocket podcast to talk about engineering careers, serverless handbook, and the current job market.

Earlier in my career when I thought I was god's gift to engineering but wasn't, I failed one of those stupid interview questions that "have nothing to do with the work". It was a great question.

What's the most algorithmically fun code you've written recently? 🤔 Here's mine: A dataviz using a grid of triangles that fits into the client's logo.

what makes a senior engineer stand out in an interview? No it's not the amount of side projects or their leetcoding speed. It's knowing how and when to ask for help.

Until recently adding a little backend to your Gatsby site meant 2 options: 1. Climbing the AWS learning curve 2. Rewrite with NextJS Now there's an /api directory 😱

If it takes 6 engineers 10 days to complete 6 projects in parallel, why does it take 8 days when you work together 🤨

Long time reader Phil asks when do you fix the tech debt you used to ship faster. Heroic efforts don't work. The real answer is "always" – a mindset of gardening.

If your house was on fire, would you mow the lawn first?

Would you rather work with a complex system or a complicated system? 🤔

Profit is not what's left after expenses, expenses are what's left after profit.

The opposite of folks who follow every FAANG trend and over-engineer their companies to death, are the folks who *never* take advice from the big boys.

When I dropped out of college to focus on freelancing back in 2012, I set 3 ground rules:

Friend, I have glimpsed the future and it is amazing. React 18 is shipping with Suspense and startTransition for deferred component rendering, but not data loading. That's coming in a future 18.x version.

When I first picked up Software Engineering at Google I thought it was another one of those FAANG books full of lessons that make no sense at human scale. I was surprised, lessons apply to teams as small as 5.

In his book, The Art of Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming says the key to a great career is vision. What does that really look like?

I've been computering daily for 24 years, since I was 9, and managing RSI since high school. People often ask how it never gets bad. This is the article I always wish I had written.

It might. What's your job? If you're in the *"write code to exact specifications"* business ... now's a good time to start leveling up. The AI's not ready yet.

The best skill you can learn is ownership. The second best is to let go.

This is hold my beer level of hackery. It didn't work but we learned lots in the process.

This blew my mind, thought you'd like it too. You can do more with ?. than you thought.

Something always goes wrong when you change hosting providers. 😅 For me it was redirects. A vital feature of any site migration.

Next time you finish a project, ask yourself: *"Might this work be important?"*. Add the polish.

Demoing startTransition is hard. Modern computers are too fast 😅 – Dan Abramov, a React core team member, helped me fix it up. Here's what I learned

I read everything about React 18 Alpha, trawled through the work group, and ran some experiments. Here's what you'll wanna know.

Words that scare developers are powerful tools that are not meant to be safe. That is a valuable lesson.

The flash of unlocked content is great fun for any paywall

Ok so I've been doing lots of research into the Software Engineer job market – Some highlights 👇

High value experts use positioning statements to say what they do for whom. Most engineers don't have one. 🤨

Twitter embeds every tweet on your page as an iframe. Loads 1.2MB of JavaScript, makes 20+ HTTP requests and uses 100+ DOM nodes. 💩

Degree matters if you have nothing better to show, consulting and BigTech backgrounds are negative, too many seniors can't code.

Continuing our quest for better Lighthouse scores, more reader privacy, and less JavaScript we attacked the next biggest culprit 👉 Twitter.

Your site may be fast for users, but Google don't care. Official metrics or bust.

Friend, how good are you at your best? ... Nobody cares. How good are you at your average? What about your worst?

The Girl loves her daily cute photos, but she's bored of repeats. What if adding images was easier 🤔

An experiment that sends daily photos from an S3 bucket to an IoT device using AWS Lambda

When talk comes to serverless, engineers have lots of questions. Here are some answers 😊

Here's a comment that resonated yesterday and you might like. It's about how to maximize the opportunity in your work.

The hallmark of a true expert is understanding about the pros and cons of your technical decisions.

Serverless is the future. New book coming out Mar 31st and it's looking bomb

Ever wondered what it's like to make a physical book? It ain't as easy as shipping code lemme tell ya 😅

How *do* you build a JavaScript function that runs in the cloud serverlessly? Here's how to get started with Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Lambda

What's the laziest thing you've ever built? For me it's a bot that sends cute pictures every day

When you think of a backend or server developer, who comes to mind? A wizard of arcane magics. The future belongs to full-stack frontend engineers.

Serverless is pretty cheap. But you *can* get it wrong.

How do you provision servers for no load most days THEN ALL THE LOAD THIS MINUTE? That's how side-projects work and it's hard

my point is that running server code on the web has become ridiculously cheap *and* easy

Reusable components like to grow boolean props for different situations and complexity soon blows up. Variant props are the perfect solution.

What slows you down most while coding? It's not lack of skill. It's not lack of ideas. It's uncertainty. Fear.

We used a man-in-the-middle attack to snoop an app's API traffic, replayed it in a GraphQL client, and successfully put it inside an AWS Lambda 🤘

Reusable hooks are all fun and games until TypeScript starts yelling at you about incompatible types.

Tried a new visual editor for NextJS and CreateReactApp. Got a site up in 20min 🤘

Write functions, mostly magic.

and I don't mean Silicon Valley the place, I mean Silicon Valley the concept.

It works! useAuth has beta-level support for Firebase Auth 🥳 I did not expect that to take 3 sessions.

Tech interviews have a magic answer: The hashmap. And it's not always best on the job.

Firebase continues to be 💩. No wonder people keep asking for support in useAuth. Almost there ✌️

How would you rollout the covid vaccine for max fairness and speed?

Support for Firebase Auth is one of the most requested features for useAuth and I figured what the heck, how hard can it be?

Wanna learn boxing? Join a gym, find a coach. Tennis player with a kink in your game? Find a coach. Software engineer with a missing skill? Google, random blogs, fun newsletters, dubious podcasts, noise on twitter 🤨

The year that felt like a drag and ended in the blink of an eye.

do you ever feel like you're working working working and nothing is happening? Like a game character running against an invisible obstacle? That's how I've been feeling lately. Stuck.

Course creators are always telling you to learn this or that but how does any of it help *your* goals? That's the missing piece 🤔

These abbreviations are getting out of hand. It's like a bad interviewer's wet dream.

You're not asking for a job, you're selling a service. The true question behind every interview is "How can you help us?"

Gatsby and NextJS do similar things differently. One is better for websites, the other for webapps. In episode 17 of CodeWithSwiz we explore the biggest difference.

You're using the many-small-repositories approach to work faster as a team. But where do you put shared code? How do you make it nice to use? How to publish and install private packages?

useAuth works without React Context! 🎉 here's how

Perfect code that doesn't solve the problem is useless. Perfect metrics that don't serve the user are a distraction.

Nader writes in worried that he started coding too late and his progress is too slow. Here's my response.

Forget time to first byte and time to interactive. What's your time to useful?

Think of the last time you started a new project. You spend the first few hours getting started. Ugh

Common problem in engineering teams: Stepping on each other's toes. JAMStack can help.

You work hard on a feature. Weeks of back and forth with designers, product managers, tech leads, and the rest of your team. Your feature is amazing and you're proud as heck! But then ...

Productivity porn shows you how to pack more into your day. Productivity porn is wrong my friend. You need to remove things to grow.

In Refactoring a useReducer to XState we talked about a 5 step process to turn a reducer into an XState state machine. Today answers "Ok now what?"

You ever feel like you have no idea what you're doing? Everyone feels that way. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

Once you know how to refactor a useReducer to XState, you gotta prove you did it right.

Would you take some % of your salary in bitcoin? The joke is that compared to pre-IPO equity, bitcoin is predictable and has a known value.

XState promises to be like useReducer+Context combined and the simplest way to handle complex state in React apps. But can it deliver? On this episode of #CodeWithSwiz, we gave it a shot.

Wow, college was such a waste of time ... when did you ever invert a binary tree outside of an interview? Honestly I never inverted a binary tree in college either ☹️

Prefetching lets you start React apps without loading spinners. Gatsby introduced this concept with `staticQuery`, react-query and NextJS make the pattern easier 😍

Times are changing, the future of web development is here.Story time! 20 years of history in a 2min read, it's gonna be great 🤘

When's the last time your first project in a new technology was also your favorite? Doesn't happen very often ...🤔 It happened to me in November 2018.

Many engineers think server-side code is the scary domain of True Engineers. Something newbies, juniors, and frontend engineers shouldn't touch. They're wrong. Modern backend is a joy. ❤️

What's the best code you ever wrote? Is it the most clever, or the cleanest. The most fun problem to solve, or the most impactful. The surprise throwaway everyone uses, or the love nobody noticed.

Update code with a JavaScript function? Easier than you think 😍

In this episode of CodeWithSwiz, we tried NextJS's support for /api routes – code running on the backend. In a word – Wow

You start a new job and it's amazing. Code all day, clear objectives, easy guidelines, ship a bunch of features be a hero. Then something happens and suddenly you get nothing done. 🤔

NextJS getStaticProps, environment vars, and why you shouldn't use yarn link – all in this episode of #CodeWithSwiz

Friend, this episode of #CodeWithSwiz was a great example of why you want to start using TypeScript and how thermal load *destroys* computers.

GraphQL solves every problem you've ever had talking to APIs on the frontend. Mention a switch to GraphQL to your team and they think it's a joke. Rewrite our entire app? oh you jokester. React Query is the perfect middle ground ❤️

Every tech employee says interviews are broken. Every employer keeps interviewing. What gives?

You're the computer, the CMS is your script. Starting small, trying NextJS, comparing microbundle vs. parcel for extracting libraries out of projects.

On CodeWithSwiz ep2, we tried NextJS and built our first tiny app. Complete with a design system, static rendering, React Query to talk to AWS Lambda, and deployed to live 🤘

Migrating from Wordpress to Markdown sounds easy. Mention it to any developer and they'll say "Pfft, an afternoon of work at worst". Suddenly it's 6months later and you're losing your mind.

Understanding beats knowledge every day. To have a strong career, learn to understand, not just to know.

A new old experiment 👉 regular livecoding. It's like a podcast with video, show notes, regular cadence, and we both learn something new.

After 4 years of putting it off, 1 year of tinkering, a month of work, and $1500 of hired help, my new blog is finally here 🎉 Here's what I learned.

"He's a frontend guy, is this even a fair question to ask?" The head of engineering was worried about our systems design question …

Engineers don't do the day to day work, they build assets the business can exploit for years to come. That's the magic

5 years ago I moved to America to chase a dream 👉 stop selling time.

Lemme guess, every project involves 1 or 2 forms and they're all the friggen same. You got forms coming out the wazoo. Render fields. Connect to state. Add field validation. Detect submit. Add form validation. Send fetch request. Repeat.

GraphQL for new projects looks great ... buuuut how do you use it with that old backend cobbled together in Rails over the last bazillion years?

Why the heck did I build a course platform for ServerlessReact.Dev when services like Teachable, Podia, Thinkific, and such already exist? Because of friction my friend.

Let's have a look at hyow GraphQL makes queries so much easier and more pleasant than REST

We live in exciting times my friend. It's never been this easy to build a webapp and make your first $1,000/month.

What if I told you modern tools let you build and launch a small webapp in 30 minutes? Complete with SSL, a .com domain, a database, a documented API, CDN hosting, fast static initial loads, and a hydrated SPA? That's the challenge I posed at Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend. The audience didn't believe me, so it was time to perform some magic. 🧙

GraphQL is taking the world by storm and it is wonderful. But in the real world, you're still dealing with REST APIs aren't you?

The Big Mac index is a purchasing power parity index published by The Economist. Jest fetch testing is a tech task so frustrating that it almost made me quit the industry. I'm writing this so you don't have to read 8234721 different blog posts, stack overflow answers, and GitHub threads with conflicting info on how to get Jest and fetch to play together.

A few months ago I inherited a Kotlin project. It was an unfinished prototype and all I had to do was wrap it up and deploy. Every time I touched the project, it broke. Nothing worked. Wouldn't run on my machine, wouldn't read API requests, couldn't get tests working, if I changed some code I broke it all. That's when I realized learning a new field is super hard

I was bored Monday night and decided to see if I still know how to build with jQuery. Nothing better to do, no pressing ideas, a bit of fun. Also a favor for a friend who's preparing to talk about React to a bunch of people who've never seen it before 😛

A fully functioning LOLCODE-to-JavaScript compiler implemented as a Babel macro. You never thought you wanted this and now here it is. You're welcome. 🐱

Say your boss gives you $1000 to grow your career. What do you do?

JavaScript generators are amazing. They let you write infinite loops that terminate. Yield values from functions before they finish … and I bet you've never used a JavaScript generator even once did you? I FOUND A USE! A real world practical use-case where generators make your code better. 😱

I used to think a senior engineer was someone who gets a project, understands the context, puts their head down, and gets it done. But no. A senior engineer does so much more than just write code and design systems.

Chatroom is slow? I know, I'll just use list virtualization! List virtualization is hard, dear reader. So, how do you virtualize a list?

You've probably seen web notifications before. YouTube shows them when it goes to a new song, Facebook pings them when a new message comes in, scammy websites ask for permissions and you say no. The usual. You can fire those notifications from anywhere inside your JavaScript.

All that once was new is old again

There's a joke in functional programming that once you understand monads, it becomes impossible to explain them to others. The nuance is nuanced, the details are hard, let’s focus on practice

I was doing code review for a coworker, and it soon became obvious that he used a linter and that the linter gave him a bright idea: _use strict comparisons_.

How many touch points does your sales process require? Do you need 2 ad clicks or 5? Two shiny demos or one fat video? As an engineer, you might not care, but this is the stuff that keeps your CEO and growth lead and head of product up at night. A business owner that can answer that 👆 question reliably is god.

Both superagent and fetch() enable you to talk to a server. The first produces clean code that gets nesty if you need many things. The second produces clean code that is Promis-y and sometimes cumbersome. The difference between superagent and fetch() isn't that one sends your headers as-given and the other lowercases their names. The difference is that superagent sends a cookie and fetch() doesn't!

This is a puzzle you can run into if you’re not careful, and sometimes, despite your best efforts, even if you are careful. It happened to me when I had a settings object that I passed into a view. The view then did things. When I made a new view from the settings object, it looked like the view I had just cleared.

Days aren't 60*60*24 seconds long. They are 1 day long, which on most days maps to 60*60*24 = 86400 seconds. But not on all days.

My favourite tool for javascript debugging is `console.log`. I mean, I love `console.log`. If I ever get a programming tattoo, it's going to be `console.log` or some variation thereof. Simple to use, works every time, and every programming language I've used since I was 9 has had some variation of it.

Using returns and callbacks in the same function. Sounds like crazy talk I know, but hear me out, I have good reason. I think.

A few years ago I was playing around with JavaScript trying to find the cleanest way to implement callbacks in functions. Primarily I wanted a readable way to make certain the last argument passed is a callback, withut having to rely on knowing how many arguments there are and so on. Instead I stumbled upon a pretty cool feature of how javascript handles function arguments.