Insights into Serverless and modern backends

The best part about writing is that you get to learn new and exciting ways you were wrong. Databases are smarter than I thought!

You've heard that array or list columns in a database are bad. But why? Yesterday it clicked for me

Task queues have been on my mind lately so here's a little primer on what they are, how they work, and why you need them when your project starts to grow.

A daring adventure of manipulating GET parameters in a NextJS 14 project, pushing hosting limits and avoiding the need for data storage. Dive into the chaos of compressing inputs to keep the project delightfully storage-free.

Behind the scenes of a tiny bug that survive 919 days

We look at React's native async support and how to use it in a NextJS 13 app. Learn how to use async components, parallel loading states, and caching with React.js and NextJS 13.

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

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 ✌️

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

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

The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures

A story of how my performance hunch was totally wrong and the answer that sped up an AWS Lambda 33%

DynamoDB Streams are a convenient way to react to changes in your database. And surprisingly easy to use 🥳

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.

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

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 ✌️

Until recently adding a little backend to your Gatsby site meant 2 options: 1. Climbing the AWS learning curve 2. Rewrite with NextJS Now there's an /api directory 😱

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

When talk comes to serverless, engineers have lots of questions. Here are some answers 😊

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 🤘

Many engineers think server-side code is the scary domain of True Engineers. Something newbies, juniors, and frontend engineers shouldn't touch. They're wrong. Modern backend is a joy. ❤️

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

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?

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. 🧙

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?

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