Fullstack Web is the bastard child of web development. BigTech frowns on its lack of specialization, everyone else drowns in its complexity. But it runs the web.
Learning from tutorials is great! You follow some steps, learn a smol lesson, and feel like you got this. Then you go into an interview, get a question from the boss, or encounter a new situation and o-oh.
Shit, how does this work again? 😅
That's the problem with tutorials. They're not how the world works. Real software is a mess. A best-effort pile of duct tape and chewing gum. You need deep understanding, not recipes.
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Curated Fullstack Web Essays
Get a series of curated essays on Fullstack Web development. Lessons and insights from building software for production. No bullshit.
Latest Fullstack Web articles from Swizec
Why PATCH endpoints matter
A painful lesson from production that brought several engineers almost to tears: *Please* add PATCH endpoints to your public APIs.
October 28th, 2022
Over-engineering tweet embeds with web components for fun and privacy
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 ✌️
October 26th, 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
You are allowed to invent HTTP status codes
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
Better tooling won't fix your API
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
How JAMStack helps you ship
Common problem in engineering teams: Stepping on each other's toes. JAMStack can help.
October 27th, 2020
Why NextJS /api routes are fab – CodeWithSwiz 6
In this episode of CodeWithSwiz, we tried NextJS's support for /api routes – code running on the backend. In a word – Wow
September 13th, 2020
In 2020's, what is "frontend"? 🤨
"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
How GraphQL blows REST out of the water
Let's have a look at hyow GraphQL makes queries so much easier and more pleasant than REST
January 23rd, 2020
It's never been this easy to build a webapp
We live in exciting times my friend. It's never been this easy to build a webapp and make your first $1,000/month.
January 21st, 2020
Is hot dog taco?
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. 🧙
October 21st, 2019
How to add real web push notifications to your webapp
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.
November 16th, 2017
How to waste hours of life with fetch() and a bit of brainfart
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!
November 1st, 2016