Posts

For those who have had me review their PR it may bring a shudder. However, as a rule of thumb I've found it helps improve overall code quality.

Being an Engineer means you come across opportunities to be the change you want to see in the world. I've become sick of seeing 'promoted' and 'suggested' posts across websites. They're not ads so AdBlock doesn't remove them, but they aren't content I'm asking for either. Without the websites in question providing a way to hide them, what is an Engineer to do? Well, good news. You could just SnipIt.

Capturing the MVP design and my thoughts, all the way to the release version. This post breaks down the what and why for how FarrellyFilm functions, with a real focus on the UX side of things. Broken down into two parts, design and feedback. I walk through each screen across both phases, with the latter focused on improvements made for users and UX.

FarrellyFilm is an analogue film camera app which allows you to experience the joy of film photography from your phone.

Developers hand rolling their own React optimisations are about to disappear. Now that the React team have celebrated their 1.0 launch of the React Compiler.

hen I first became a tech lead I had one vision for what that would mean. However, now having worked many tech lead roles, my vision has changed.

For every member of a group there's a path of communication between them and every other person. As a group grows that graph can become unwieldy. Especially when conversations are held in private.

Do you feel a twinge of confusion when picking between using a pixel or rem value? Are you unsure when to use which? Let's walk through it together

Throughout all tiers of Software Developers and frankly also people in the world. I've come across those who insist to know or willingly pretend to be knowledgeable. It's all a waste of time, it's okay not to know everything.

As developers we're trained to think through a solution and identify the edge cases. We then want to safe guard against the edge case scenarios ever being able to happen. But are they?

Let your pipeline doing the heavy lifting for you. Moving towards having a clear structure in how code is written allows your tooling to enforce the patterns you want.

Using tools you know well will aid you in your development flow. Don't get bogged down trying to learn 20 different tools. You could end up getting stuck trying to quit vim.

We're all denizens of the digital world. So we're all aware of how fraught and difficult it can be to communicate via text. Especially when that one coworker keeps ending every sentence like this..

In search of improving your team's PR reviews? Have you tried Mob Programming? How about Mob Review?

A few times in my career I've seen the same thing happen. It's never pleasant. And when it's happened, I haven't always dealt with it the right way.

We all want to work in an environment where the company culture is genuinely good. From my experience I've found a good handful of ways to help facilitate that at the team level.

We're all new to using LLMs in our Engineering workflow. One lesson I've taken from my experience is that, ChatGPT will lie to you. So how we can we work with a tool that lies to us?

Web scraping is a way to collect data on webpages across the internet. See something on a webpage that you want? Take it, scrape it. This tutorial is going to use Puppeteer, a NodeJS tool specialised for web scraping, and automation.

90% of us don’t go past the first page of Google search results. From living within a career where the quality of search terms resolving your queries is a measurable correlation to your overall skills, you, the question asker, begin to embark on a journey to increase efficiency, and reduce pondering. It is either the answer, or it is not.

Us as humans tend to focus on negatives rather than positive, that’s an artefact of our monkey brains focusing on survival. Although it may feel like it at times, code review isn’t a question of survival, it should be constructive criticism to improve the codebase, and it’s maintainers.

Monorepos are a great tool to use when you have code to share across many different repositories. For example, if you have a web, and native app which can share code, creating a 'common' or 'shared' repository can keep your code DRY. Otherwise you're going to be abusing copy and paste in a way Larry Tesler won't be proud of.

We’ve all been here. You’re looking for a new job, and you’ve aced a couple of interviews. They now ask you to do a take-home technical test, no worries you think, I’m a great developer. Then you look at the test... It’s 10 hours worth of work. You cringe, you cry, you wonder if it’s worth your time.

During a release, one of the tasks you’ll need to do is bump the current version. Generally by incrementing the patch number (assuming semantic versioning). Then you’ll create a git tag, but why do we? It’s easier to read. That’s it. It doesn’t provide any hidden benefit, it’s just a more readable way to find a specific point in time of your codebase.

At the end of the day, no test is perfect, we can only aim for perfection. However we look at three different programming tests - PR review, Pomodoro timer, and the hands-off test. Then delve into the how, and why of each. Keeping in mind feedback is critical, ask the developers who took the test what they thought about it.

Now that we’re able to make promises, access the result, and handle rejection. We’re in a stellar place to start to tackle some more complex situations we may find ourselves in. Such as having a series of Promises to make, but not caring about the result. Or needing each Promise to resolve. The Promise API provides us four distinct methods...

A promise is an object which will return an asynchronous (think not at the same time) result. The classic promise use case is fetching data from a remote server. You have no idea how long it’ll take for the data to come back, you’re just promising Javascript that it’ll come, along with some code to run when it does.

Once upon a time I stumbled across an article chronicling a machine learning algorithm using the Harry Potter series as input to write it’s own chapter. Enthralled by the pure oddity of what a machine’s understanding of language and creativity turned out to be, I was intrigued to do something similar...