React Router makes it extremely easy to define routing in your React application, but out of the box doesn’t concern itself with which routes should require authentication and which ones should now. I’ve solved this problem in a past life, using React Router v4 and looking back at the code
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After a very brief foray into using create-react-app, razzle and next.js recently, I decided that this old dog still prefers to go it alone and just build things out without the aid of frameworks and boilerplates. With that, I was quickly reminded of an issue that I’ve run into in
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Automation is one of the best ways to improve productivity. Even as a development team of one, spending a bit of time on DevOps and improving your developer quality of life can pay off immensely. Automated tasks strip away cognitive load. No more forgetting to deploy code because the process
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My buddy Robert has been seeking new opportunities in the software development realm, and recently ran into a coding challenge that I haven’t thought about in a good long time: converting an integer to Roman numeral. Now, I actually hate these kinds of brain teasers in the context of interviewing
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Programming languages can change pretty regularly, and I try to carve out some time periodically to catch up on the latest and greatest the languages I love have to offer. With that, recently I was poking around on JavaScript’s string prototype and came to realize that there were some string
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Recently I was faced with the need to remove an item from an array, by index in JavaScript and I came to realize it had been quite a while since I had to do something like that. My initial, and extremely incorrect thought was that I could just use delete
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Recently I decided to finally tackle the ever growing S3 bucket for the niche social network I run. The reason it’s ever growing is because I never implemented any sort of hard deletion logic. At one point, I was planning to move the images over to soft deletions, but never
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I’ve been working with Typescript on a daily basis for the last year. Admittedly, I still feel pretty amateurish with it. Mostly due to the fact that I’ve mostly been working with it on an existing stack at work and minor application of it on my own side projects. With
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Recently I’ve been putting time into rebuilding the server infrastructure for Holiday API. This has included hardening the system to be more fault tolerant and building out a new cluster of web servers. The biggest improvement was [finally] introducing a continuous deployment pipeline to complement the existing continuous integration flow.
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I’m sick and fucking tired of being asked if the reason that I use vim (currently using nvim) is because I can’t figure out how to exit. I get it, you saw some stupid shit on Stack Overflow and you think everybody that uses vim is incapable of knowing how
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This isn’t a post about mansplaining or anything like that. I’m simply taking about explaining things instead of communicating them. In regard to project management, explanations tend to be a reactive act. Explanations are a way to justify why a project is behind. You could easily swap “explanations” for “excuses”
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As a single developer on a handful of projects, I’m a huge proponent for establishing systems and best practices, even if they don’t seem practical as an army of one. In the past I’ve written about making sure version control is in place even if you’re the only developer on
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I’ve been a professional software engineer for just shy of half of my life. Along the way I’ve had the opportunity to work with a ton of different people and personalities. A common theme with most developers is that they really like to do things their way. This tends to
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A buddy of mine recently asked me how to post code to Slack and make it look good. It wasn’t the first time this has come up either. Different folks have asked, not like the same person keeps bugging me about it :P Trying to explain things to him reminded
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Recently I was writing some code that needed to detect if a certain character was at the end of the string to determine if some additional logic should be executed. The reason for this was because the additional logic to run was pretty hefty and for pre-mature optimization’s sake, I
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Checking whether or not a string contains another string, or just a single character. It’s a been a pretty unavoidable sanity check in my programming career. It’s not quite a problem for the ages, but it comes up regularly and can be approached a few different ways. ES5 and prior
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I don’t claim to know all the things, and this post is definitely something that I’m pretty sure nearly everybody on the planet knew about but me. The problem I was attempting to solve recently is that I had a list and the left alignment of the multiple lined list
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I really, really really want to love nvim. Yet another go with it this past week and I’m still not convinced it’s ready for me. With that, I do agree that it’s the future of vim. Development still seems to be moving quickly and in the right direction, but as
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FizzBuzz, the engineering smoke test that quickly reveals if somebody is drastically under qualified in their development abilities. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the exercise, most are able to make short work of it. It only leverages a small handful of programming concepts that even the most novice developer should
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Usually around a holiday I will do a post that’s somehow related to the holiday. Seemed kind of silly to do a post on how to calculate Independence Day in the United States since it’s pretty straight forward. It always lands on the 4th day of the month of July.
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I was struck with downtime last week. Linode’s Fremont data center went offline in a big way. Service was interrupted for nearly 4 hours. Did I panic? OF COURSE I DID! At first at least. Thing is, when a site of mine goes down, I just assume that I had
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Even though I’ve been using MongoDB for the last few years, I’m still very much a noob when it comes to a lot of things. One of those things would be unique indexes. Generally speak, I interact with MongoDB three different ways: I write code that explicitly creates something with
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With the release of inbound webhooks for CrowdSync workflows last week, it seemed fitting to do a write up on how to POST to a webhook. So what is a webhook, anyway? The Wikipedia definition is that webhooks are “used-defined HTTP callbacks”. Kind of a stuffy definition if you ask
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Recently I was working with some data coming out of a Redis pipeline and I wanted to take the data and split it up into an array of X items per key. I was working with PHP, this wouldn’t have been a big deal, just use array_chunk and get on
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If you’ve ever used Bootstrap, you probably know that it’s pretty aggressive in it’s use of !important in it’s styles. At CrowdSync we love Bootstrap, having ditched Foundation for it, but the overzealous approach to !important does get in our way sometimes. Similar to our post earlier in the week,
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