Create & Auto-deploy a Website with Create React App, Github, and Netlify

Ever wanted to develop your own website, but didn’t know where to start? Here is a quick tutorial on how to get your own website set up (for free!) within a couple of minutes using Create React App. We’ll also use Github and Netlify’s auto-deployment feature. React Application Setup Our site will be a React […]

Speeding Up Remote Project Onboarding with VS Code Live Share

Joining on a new project while working remotely is difficult. Learning the tech stack, business logic, test process, and so on is much harder to do when you’re alone. Of course, when I say alone, I don’t mean completely alone. You have Zoom, Discord, Teams, and Slack. But you are still physically alone. Your coworkers […]

How to Tackle Ill-Defined Technical Work

So you’re humming along as a member of a decently performing team, knocking out user stories in your well-managed backlog. But when you go to pick up your next story – surprise! — you get a technically-focused task that’s uncharacteristically lacking in definition. It’s not clear where to start, what to do next, or whether […]

Shell Scripts to Clone Prod Data Locally

It seems like every web project inevitably has a development need to clone production data locally. In this post, I’ll walk through my latest shell scripts for backing up a remote Postgres database and loading it locally. I’ve written various scripts like this for various tech stacks over the years. This time around, it’s a […]

Screen – My Favorite Multi-Purpose Tool for Pair Programming

As remote work extends into the foreseeable future, we’re all searching for ways to make long-distance pair programming work better — especially when joining a project (or, in my case, just starting out as a developer). If I were living through an alternate 2020 in which I was sitting physically next to my pair, I […]

Integrating ESLint into an Existing Codebase

Have you ever turned on ESLint and been faced with thousands of lines of red-highlighted code? I’ve been there. I was recently tasked with adding ESLint to a large codebase so we could enable linting in our CI pipeline. The developers who owned the project were not very familiar with Javascript or ESLint, and I […]

Better Remote Pairing with Keycastr and Presentify

We’ve all been doing a lot more remote pairing lately. Since March, our team has tried just about every remote collaboration tool available. For pair programming, we’ve relied on a blend of video conferencing, screen sharing, and VS Code LiveShare. LiveShare gives us Google Docs-like collaborative editing, while a shared screen lets both people see […]

Onomatopoeia and Code Readability

How often do you think, “This code is unreadable!” while trying to understand code that someone else wrote? A lot of things can contribute to unreadable code. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of what you’re used to. Other times, code can be made more readable just by rearranging its structure. Tools Ever been involved in […]

Developer/Designer Collaboration on Single-Page Web Apps

Single-page web apps are an ideal environment for close designer/developer collaboration. Developers often lack the intricate knowledge of CSS and HTML layouts they need to implement a designer’s work as first imagined. Fortunately, many designers have experience with front-end web development. Cooperation between these two “teams” yields faster implementation of designs that represent the designer’s […]

Defined Docker Networks for Seamless Communication Between Projects

If you have a containerized application composed of multiple services, it can become a burden to string together in-network communication. Fortunately, Docker Compose solves this networking problem by making it easy for your containers to communicate without knowing one another’s context. In a couple of short steps, I’ll show you how to quickly get a […]

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