Building a Ping Pong Ranking App using TypeScript functions — Seasoned software engineers long for the good old days when web development was simple. You just needed a few files and a server to get up and running. No complicated infrastructure, no endless amount of frameworks and libraries, no build tools. Just some ideas and some code hacked together to…

And how you can do it, too! — Recently, I migrated a substantial codebase from using Flow types to using PropTypes. I’ve chronicled the process for anyone looking to do the same thing. Motivation First off, why did I do this? Well, there were several reasons. The short answer is that the company had dozens of code repos, but…

Screen reader testing, keyboard-only navigation, and more — I’ve spent the greater part of my career thus far as a frontend software engineer emphasizing accessibility and design systems. As such, a frequent part of my job is conducting accessibility audits for various pages and features. Sometimes I’ll be asked to audit an existing set of pages so we…

How to get your app up and running — and logging — in no time — The console.log function — the poor man’s debugger — is every JavaScript developer’s best friend. We use it to verify that a certain piece of code was executed or to check the application's state at a given time. We may also use console.warn to send warning messages or console.error to…

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 Oftentimes, dependency upgrades become neglected, leading to using dependencies that have been outdated for years.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…