With just a few lines of code! — Insomnia is an open source API client that helps you test and debug GraphQL, gRPC, and REST API endpoints. As powerful as Insomnia is, sometimes you want to extend its functionality even further, which you can do with plugins. There are many great plugins available on the Insomnia Plugin Hub…

Job hopping, internal promotions, and stretch assignments — Hot take: Software engineers should job hop as much as they can during the first five years of their career. Now I don’t mean that you should change jobs every three months, but I do mean that you will learn a lot more working at a few different companies over…

Make visual code reviews easier! — Code reviews are essential before merging a pull request. It’s a common practice to have another engineer look through the code changes, and it’s even better if you have a continuous integration (CI) pipeline configured that runs linters and unit tests to catch issues automatically. For UI changes, it’s also…

Finding meaning in work — I find myself having an existential crisis at work about every six months. “What am I doing with my life?” “Am I wasting my time?” “Does what I’m doing right now matter?” These questions have continually resurfaced for me over the last decade regardless of what company I’m working for…

Why some people are better problem solvers than others — Think before you code. I give this advice to every junior engineer I meet. Yet most younger developers have a hard time following it. Taking the time to slow down and think will make you a more efficient engineer and a better troubleshooter and problem solver. Let’s look at three…

PCI, PII, PHI, and more! — Any company working with sensitive data needs to make security a top priority. Sensitive data could include payment card industry (PCI) data like credit card info, personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers, protected health information (PHI) like medical history, and more. PCI, PII, and PHI? When it comes…

Get up and running in just a few minutes! — Maven is a popular tool for managing software projects. It can help you create, build, test, document, and deploy your app. Maven is a great choice for Java projects and can be run through the command line or with an IDE like IntelliJ. If you’re new to Java, the tooling…

Static analysis checkers, CI tools, unit tests, and more — As more and more companies focus on making their apps accessible, a question that often comes up is “How do we make sure we don’t let things slip?” We’ve done all this work to remediate our app, but how do we make sure we don’t dig ourselves back into a…

I work in a large engineering organization that has thousands of repos actively in use. The unique nature of my current role means that rather than working in just a few of these repos, I am often working in several new repos each week. That’s a lot of new information…