Never miss out on the latest features, bug fixes, and security patches — Keeping your JavaScript dependencies up to date is important. In companies that have dozens (or hundreds!) of repos, this is no small feat. Oftentimes, dependency upgrades become neglected, leading to using dependencies that have been outdated for years. When you don’t keep your dependencies up to date, you miss out…

An open letter from an individual contributor to managers everywhere — I’ve had 17 managers at 4 companies over the last 9 years. That’s a lot of manager turnover. With each new manager comes new expectations. I have to re-learn how to navigate the new relationship every time. How does this person prefer to communicate? What is their management style? What…

Pro tips and reflections on past hackathons — Developers love to hack, but software engineering as a profession can actually be quite mundane. We attend hours of meetings, give status reports, fix bugs, maintain legacy software, and work on less-than-exciting projects. Not all of us are out there changing the world and building the next hottest new technology. …

Configuration, best practices, and more — Most frontend developers use ESLint for linting their JavaScript. ESLint is a static analysis checker that analyzes your source code and looks for errors and violations of best practices. It helps you quickly find problems, even before running your app locally. ESLint is configured with an .eslintrc.json file. You can…

I’ve been a longtime advocate of pull request templates. These templates allow you to provide instructions to developers creating pull requests in your repos so that they will be reminded to include all the relevant information you need to properly review their code. Pull request templates are a great place…

As a content creator, you know that writing opinion pieces can be a challenging but rewarding task. It requires not only a strong understanding of the topic at hand, but also the ability to articulate your thoughts and ideas clearly and persuasively. But what if you could have a tool…

Using blueprint specification, Render API, and dashboard — When your app is experiencing high traffic or utilization, you need to scale your service to handle that load. Scaling can be done either vertically or horizontally — or both! Vertical scaling means making a single resource bigger or more powerful. For example, you might add more CPU or RAM…

When everyone owns quality, no one does — I’ve noticed a growing trend in software companies over the last few years in which upper management declares that quality assurance roles will no longer exist at the company. Then, the entire QA department is either let go or transitioned into traditional software development roles. …

Recursion doesn’t have to be scary — Recursion is the nemesis of every developer, only matched in power by its friend, regular expressions. Recursion can be hard to wrap your head around for a couple of reasons. First, you have to grasp the concept of a function calling itself. …