A painful lesson from production that brought several engineers almost to tears: *Please* add PATCH endpoints to your public APIs.
October 28th, 2022

A fun problem for RESTful APIs: Did you get 404 because your URL is wrong or because the resource wasn't found?
June 7th, 2022

Microservices are a pain in the ass. They turn every system into a byzantine mess of complexity. But this week ... they saved my butt.
May 13th, 2022

The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures
April 4th, 2022

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.
December 21st, 2021

RESTful APIs are like Agile – everyone does it differently and if it isn't working, it's your fault for doing it wrong. 🤨
November 30th, 2021

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 ✌️
October 19th, 2021

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.
March 16th, 2021

"He's a frontend guy, is this even a fair question to ask?" The head of engineering was worried about our systems design question …
August 7th, 2020

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?
March 12th, 2020

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?
September 30th, 2019

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
May 27th, 2019

Using returns and callbacks in the same function. Sounds like crazy talk I know, but hear me out, I have good reason. I think.
June 26th, 2014