Swizec's articles in the "programming" category
I aim to write mindblowing emails with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them.
Below are 95 articles filed under programming. Enjoy ❤️
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"
Programming in Markdown
What if you could focus on the fun _engineering_ part of your job, not on coding? You can!
August 1st, 2023
useCallback is a code smell
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.
September 16th, 2022
If it works together, it lives together
Wherein I use LEGO to talk about organizing your code for ease of use
September 5th, 2022
Why others' code is hard to navigate
Some people like to organize code in files and folders and neat categories. Others love search. When they work together, that's the challenge.
September 1st, 2022
Your code doesn't matter
"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?
August 16th, 2022
Move your business logic into data
The quickest way to simplify a complex function with lots of logic is to turn it into data. A lesson from production
August 3rd, 2022
Small choices can wreck your codebase
wanna see the strangest looping construct I've found in production code?
December 3rd, 2021
Stop SHOUTING = 'shouting'
A hill I will die on 👉 global CONSTANT = 'constant' are bad
September 21st, 2021
Slack lied to me
August 25th, 2016
Does it even make sense to move to San Francisco?
May 13th, 2016
Webpack lazy loading on Rails with CDN support
June 4th, 2015
Week 16: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
February 19th, 2014
Mixing mixpanel into backbone
January 24th, 2014
My old code is atrocious
November 12th, 2013
About achieving polymorphism in Javascript
October 15th, 2013
Are map, reduce, and filter turing complete?
September 17th, 2013
Writing modular Backbone with Backbone.SubRoute
July 31st, 2013
Always look for the gem
July 23rd, 2013
CircleCI - sexy continuous integration for private repos
July 5th, 2013
I infiltrated another Rails Girls event, #RailsGirlsMb
June 4th, 2013
Dynamic languages have jumped the shark
May 31st, 2013
Videos from first Javascript meetup in Ljubljana
May 3rd, 2013
How CamelCase ruined my day and my dev environment
April 16th, 2013
The trials and tribulations of a large-ish dataset
January 15th, 2013
My very own daily WTF
January 10th, 2013
I infiltrated #railsgirlslj, here's what it was like
December 17th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: Emacs tramp-mode
December 6th, 2012
Testing socket.io apps
November 30th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: alertify.js
November 29th, 2012
Webcamp Zagreb report
November 27th, 2012
Game development in Webgl
November 19th, 2012
Experienced developers can't solve this problem
November 2nd, 2012
Symfony and the scary world of PHP
October 26th, 2012
Simple trick that lets you code twice as fast
October 8th, 2012
Cool thing Thursday: Ceylon
September 27th, 2012
Monads, monads, monads, monads
September 3rd, 2012
I've hit a glass ceiling of coding productivity. Now what?
August 30th, 2012
An elegant way to randomly change every list member in Haskell
August 13th, 2012
Blackbox testing node.js apps
July 23rd, 2012
Levenshtein distance in Haskell
July 6th, 2012
Haskell and randomness
July 2nd, 2012
Why I still haven't learned Haskell
June 18th, 2012
Why people making compilers are superheroes
June 11th, 2012
Natural Language Generation system architectures
May 30th, 2012
Programmers are optimists
May 25th, 2012
My brain can't handle OOP anymore
May 7th, 2012
Using Backbone to improve multiselects
April 13th, 2012
What Refactoring is, and what it isn't
April 11th, 2012
The exciting future Javascript
April 2nd, 2012
My language is better than yours
March 30th, 2012
I wish this existed
March 23rd, 2012
Closure and currying magic for cleaner javascript
March 14th, 2012
How to make your django app slow
March 5th, 2012
Unit testing is for lazy people
February 27th, 2012
The commonest javascript bug
February 24th, 2012
Heroku, mongo, node.js - a problem
January 30th, 2012
Appcelerator Titanium might've made it to my toolbox
January 23rd, 2012
This Haskell is wrong. Why?
January 20th, 2012
Minimum substring cover problem
January 11th, 2012
Collatz, Haskell and Memoization
January 9th, 2012
A message from your future self
January 6th, 2012
Deca - a cool systems programming language
January 4th, 2012
Sabbatical week day 3: Raining datatypes
December 29th, 2011
Learning me a Haskell
December 23rd, 2011
The problem with threads
December 21st, 2011
Why programmers work at night
December 15th, 2011
Javascript's lack of strftime
December 12th, 2011
Fun javascript feature
December 7th, 2011
Simple trick for testing forms full of checkboxes with django
December 2nd, 2011
A turing machine in 133 bytes of javascript
November 28th, 2011
Parsing JavaScript with JavaScript
November 11th, 2011
Programmers are fucking lazy
October 18th, 2011
Functional isn't always better
October 7th, 2011
Collect your data carefully, a lesson
October 3rd, 2011
I learned two things today 27.8.
August 27th, 2011
Software dev isn't just a logical process
August 10th, 2011
I learned two things today
July 18th, 2011
A cool JavaScript property you never noticed
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.
April 16th, 2011
Benchmarking node, tornado and django for concurrency
April 15th, 2011
Doing nothing is the hardest thing ever
October 4th, 2010
Hard work is a total waste of time
September 22nd, 2010
The strangestest Hello World I ever made
August 19th, 2010
Programatically uploading to blobstore in python
August 10th, 2010
Django protip #2: Forms are awesome
August 3rd, 2010
Django protip #1: A better App structure
July 21st, 2010
Processing as-you-read in clojure
April 12th, 2010
Splitting and merging django models with perfect transparency
February 18th, 2010
Python multiprocessing is fucking sweet
January 18th, 2010
How Lisp changed my style
January 11th, 2010
These are the times I love my job
December 28th, 2009
Heaven is where your code lies
December 7th, 2009
The ten pros and cons of unit testing
August 4th, 2009
Unit testing is anti-productive
June 23rd, 2009
Slovenia php conference day2 (live blogging)
June 6th, 2009
Adobe AIR's javascript no eval or include is moronic
March 25th, 2009
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails 💌 on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. 👌"