This isn’t a blog about how to build a markdown compiler. It’s a reflection on a project I’m using to challenge myself. It feels like a lot has happened on my project since I wrote part 1, but I’ve written less than 100 lines of code. …

This is not a how to post. This is part of a series on a project that I feel will challenge me in new ways, and I want to document my experience as a matter of reflection. Since I’ve started to learn to code, challenging myself with incrementally harder projects…

It’s been right around a year since I’ve started obsessing over events and state management — I’ve created several posts on events and state, and each one reflects progress I’ve made along the way in my thinking, but I’ve never taken the time to express any one post to the…

I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a distinction in front end development (and I imagine all kinds of development) between simple and complex work. With front end dev, you should know that we often use patterns for simple work as matters of convenience. For simple forms and their associated CRUD…

Some front end applications can get complicated. Others are simple such as a mostly static site with simple form fields. This article is for complicated apps, and we’ll imagine we’re using React to talk through the complexity. The TLDR of it is this: Thinking in terms of events is easier…

I used to believe that good software engineers solve hard problems. “Solve hard problems” was my mantra. A programmer senior to me once told me that software engineers “manage complexity.” …

The first time someone told me that unit testing should teach you how to design your code, I thought they meant for the backend only. As far as I can (anecdotally) tell, front end developers generally struggle with unit tests. I distinctly remember believing that writing React tests for real…

I recently listened to a talk called ‘Uncoupling’ by Michael Nygard. He spoke about coupling and categorized it into different types. One kind of coupling he spoke about is Semantic Coupling. …

TypeScript opens the doors for enforcing good patterns in your code. Before jumping into the interesting stuff, we should be clear that the problem we’re trying to solve is related to the famous “billion dollar mistake” — in other words, using null in a language. By using null, you open…