Articles

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

September 2019

Moving 13 years of Wordpress blog to Gatsby Markdown

Building software is a distraction

San Francisco v. Europe part 2

What happens when you push AWS credentials to GitHub

Thoughts on San Francisco after 2 weeks in Europe

August 2019

The Big Mac index and Jest fetch testing

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.

useReducer + useContext for easy global state without libraries

useAuth – the simplest way to add authentication to your React app

Come hang out in Barcelona and learn GraphQL, Serverless, Gatsby, ...

July 2019

The code is not the goal

Better engineer or More Effective engineer?

A short lesson in debugging complex systems

After 9 months of freedom, today I start a new job

The day I crashed production 4 times

The unreasonable difficulty of adding a feature to a Textarea

Friend, go offline

A whole new level of technical decision

Hustle, life, and Bernoulli trials

How to drive React state with D3 transitions for complex animation

June 2019

A Drilldown Piechart with React and D3

Coders, protect your hands; you won't like coding without em

Build one to throw away

TypeScript's biggest flaw and how you can use ducks to fix it

Is JavaScript really getting too complex?

The Principle of Charity in tech

Getting the CSS out of rendered React components

May 2019

TypeScript for serverless lambda backends 👌

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

Just for fun 👉 React vs. jQuery vs. Svelte, same 🐱 app

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 😛

Svelte takes the best of React and the best of Vue to make something awesome

The Phoenix Project recap