A small project to put Slack links in their (one) place — Do you use Slack by chance? Or any messaging app? If so, you might have experienced the following problem: People will post all sorts of interesting links, but as time goes on, it all gets lost in oblivion. What if you miss out on a mind-blowing YouTube link just because…

How to tackle a tough system design discussion as an engineer — System design conversations can be really challenging. There can be a lot of ambiguity, options, and ideas —mixed with limited time and hard problems to solve. From experience, I’ve found a versatile approach that helps make these conversations more structured, interesting, and productive. Let’s dive right in! 1. Requirements & Goals

Get NVM and Node quickly and easily. — If you’re a software engineer with a Mac, having NVM and Node installed is likely a requirement. In 2022, it’s easier than ever to get this all installed and check it off your to-do list. There are a ton of articles out there about installing NVM and Node, however, many…

A coding problem and solution, explained with JavaScript. — Familiar with common data structures in computer science? If so, you’re probably aware that there are pros and cons to any data structure. In this article I’ll describe and solve a particular coding problem that helps demonstrate data structure tradeoffs by way of example. Let’s go over the problem! Diving into the problem The…

Here’s how to get started. — Stripe started many years ago as a humble payment gateway for developers, but now is looking far into the future and building the infrastructure of what will be a future for commerce. …

When it comes to professional online portfolios, it’s easy to think that only a specific type of person needs to have one. For example, maybe there’s a photographer who wants a website to showcase their artwork online. That makes sense because a photographer usually has a literal portfolio of photos…

Learn about hiding and using secret keys in React. — I remember the moment when I first learned about dotenv. It’s not something you learn about in normal computer science classes at school, yet something you’ll inevitably need to understand if you’re building any sort of app that interfaces with another service. I was first exposed to all this a…

A quick, niche tutorial for crawling internal webpages on a website. — Have you ever wanted to crawl a website, but specifically one that only visits each page of that website, and ignores other stuff like external links? Okay, no worries if not, but if so, this article could be helpful. One easy way to crawl internally is by leveraging sitemaps. Many…

Seven eye-opening books about business, psychology, and more. — Back in 2020, I published an article reviewing a few of my favorite books. Since then, we’ve experienced a global pandemic, and I’ve had a lot of time to read more books. Perhaps a little too much time? My stance on reading hasn’t changed. Squeezing some reading into each day…