Articles

Software engineering lessons from production, raw and honest from the heart โ€” almost 20 years of them. Jump to a year in the sidebar, or browse categories and curated collections.

May 2021

Why you need a positioning statement

High value experts use positioning statements to say what they do for whom. Most engineers don't have one. ๐Ÿคจ

Build privacy-focused blazing fast tweet embeds โ€“ CodeWithSwiz 30

Twitter embeds every tweet on your page as an iframe. Loads 1.2MB of JavaScript, makes 20+ HTTP requests and uses 100+ DOM nodes. ๐Ÿ’ฉ

What matters in a senior engineer job interview

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

Twitter embeds without JavaScript, pt1 โ€“ #CodeWithSwiz 29

Continuing our quest for better Lighthouse scores, more reader privacy, and less JavaScript we attacked the next biggest culprit ๐Ÿ‘‰ Twitter.

April 2021

the trashcan metaphor

2 quick tips for 250% better Lighthouse scores โ€“ CodeWithSwiz 28

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

Flow good for programming, not engineering

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

Serverless file upload to S3 with NextJS and AWS Lambda โ€“ CodeWithSwiz 27

The Girl loves her daily cute photos, but she's bored of repeats. What if adding images was easier ๐Ÿค”

Send daily random photos from an S3 bucket using AWS Lambda โ€“ CodeWithSwiz 25

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

March 2021

Your serverless questions, answered

When talk comes to serverless, engineers have lots of questions. Here are some answers ๐Ÿ˜Š

Your luck & opportunity surface area

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

How do you know if serverless fits your project?

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

Serverless Handbook coming Mar 31st

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

Different medium, different mindset

Ever wondered what it's like to make a physical book? It ain't as easy as shipping code lemme tell ya ๐Ÿ˜…

Go full-stack in 5min with your first cloud function

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

Can you automate love?

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

If you can JavaScript, you can backend

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.

That time serverless melted my credit card

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

Why serverless fits side-projects perfectly

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

How a $12 AWS bill powers a $50k business

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

Variants โ€“ a quick tip for better React components

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

February 2021

Can you code faster?

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

Reverse engineer a GraphQL API to automate love notes โ€“ CodeWithSwiz 24

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 ๐Ÿค˜

A TypeScript trick for reusable hooks

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

React Bricks - visual blocks editor for NextJS #CodeWithSwiz 22

Tried a new visual editor for NextJS and CreateReactApp. Got a site up in 20min ๐Ÿค˜

The Magic Function principle

Write functions, mostly magic.

January 2021

"silicon valley is like hollywood"

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

[CodeWithSwiz 21] useAuth beta support for Firebase ๐ŸŽ‰

It works! useAuth has beta-level support for Firebase Auth ๐Ÿฅณ I did not expect that to take 3 sessions.

Tech interview best practice that fails in life

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

[CodeWithSwiz 20] Adding Firebase support to useAuth, pt2

Firebase continues to be ๐Ÿ’ฉ. No wonder people keep asking for support in useAuth. Almost there โœŒ๏ธ