This post can also be read on my medium blog. If you stick around a team long enough, you start to become the person who knows a lot about a technical stack. As many of us have learned, sometimes “knows a lot” is code for “the last person who touched this repository”. It can be overwhelming to be in the position at first as you begin to balance answering questions from junior engineers with…
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Technical Blog
Find my technical posts on Medium as well.
Alright, alright — always doesn’t mean always. But really, the backend for front end pattern is one that everyone should be using and can be tempting to skip. But having a backend for frontend should mean little upfront work that allows a range of future benefits. What is a BFF? A Backend for frontend (BFF) is a server that exists to server a client application. In a sense every web application…
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Recently, I’ve been working to add more unit tests to front end code. Using Kent C. Dodds’ great react-testing-library (if you haven’t checked it out, it’s seriously 🔥) alongside Jest. Testing small components is usually pretty straightforward. Pass them mocked functions as props, fire some events, and validate things look like you expect. Most of my fun has been when I’ve need to mock…
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A while back I read about some of the metaprogramming features that were added in ES6. While I use some extensively, like Symbols, others I’ve had a hard time finding a use for. Like Proxies. They seem so cool (and now you know my idea of cool 😎). I’ll explain briefly what a Proxy is and then what I used it to actually solve recently. The Proxy Object Before going too far, I need to give credit…
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Book Reviews
Two things - I have no idea why I decided to read this right after Way Of Kings. I don't recommend reading two 1000+ page novels in a row unless you like to feeling that you'll never finish a book again. I read this right before Coronavirus started to become an emergency outside of China. I even tweeted about it which in retrospect seems like poor taste since I've been working from home for the…
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Okay, so I say this is the first book in the Stormlight Archives, but it's long enough to be the first three books. Now that being said, I never felt bored during this 1000 page adventure. Sure there were some story lines I was more interested in than others at times. And I wanted everyone to get on with their destiny. But what makes this book incredible is the amount of effort that goes into…
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If you read neuromancer and like it, then I think you're required to read this book? I don't know - I don't make the rules - but I'm pretty certain that one is a hard and fast law. This is the second book I've read of Stephenson's (the first being Seveneves) and his writing is great. He find a way of immersing you in a world. His characters are punchy and likable. In both books, however, you get…
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E.R. Eddison was a member of the famous group of English writers known as the inklings alongside C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I guess they all had a thing for using initials. He wrote the Worm Ouroboros in 1922 after the first world war. It became a seminal piece in the fantasy genre. When the Tolkien first started publishing the Lord of the Rings, it was The Worm Ouroboros to which the series…
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