The Startup CTO

The Startup CTO

Building companies with web technology

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GitHub, Architecture, Technical Debt

Easily identify technical debt in any repository

Technical debt is a term used a lot whenever a codebase is not to our liking, and there's never enough time to fix all of it. What actually is technical debt, how do you quickly prioritize what to work on - and what are these GitHub Blocks that people are talking about?

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TypeScript, NextJS, AWS, Meta

Rewriting my blog from scratch with NextJS

Should I have written articles instead of rewriting the blog itself? Probably. Did I learn a lot about NextJS, Rush monorepos, AWS CDK, validation libraries and more in the process? You bet! So, what did I learn?

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Marketing, Competitive Analysis

How to read any startup's source code

So you are in interviews as an engineer with an SaaS-startup and want to impress them with your deep knowledge of their tech stack? Here are some tricks I have used in the past to know more about their technology than the interviewer themself.

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Hiring, People

Why take-home assignments might not be as bad as their reputation

I have dropped out of recruiting processes in the past after they asked me to do a take-home assignment. Still, a take-home assignment is part of almost every recruiting process I define. Here I'll write about how these two go together, and what a typical recruiting process I design looks like.

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TypeScript

10 bad TypeScript habits to break this year

TypeScript and JavaScript have steadily evolved over the last years, and some of the habits we built over the last decades have become obsolete. Some might never have been meaningful. Here's a list of 10 habits that we all should break.

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React, tdd

TDD in a React frontend

Only few professional developers seriously doubt the value of tdd. But in reality, tdd is often limited to the backend. Part of it is due to missing skills on how to tdd in the frontend.

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Open source, GitHub

Automating Open-Source on GitHub

Maintaining open source is a noble, but can be time-consuming endeavor. It doesn't have to be, though. During Hacktoberfest 2020 I used one of my repositories to experiment with automation around contribution and maintenance of jsx-readme. This is what I learned.

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React, TypeScript, Open source

What writing my own JSX renderer taught me about React

One of the reasons that React got so popular is definitively the syntax it introduced: Writing HTML-like code to declaratively describe components just feels good. But this brought me to the question: Why is this syntax only used for React, basically for describing HTML? Well, it isn't.

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Books

Summarized – Tech and business books I read in 2020

In 2020 I thought I would find less time to read, due to the missing commute, my main reading time for 2019. This lead me to explicitly take time to read, and actually finish more books than in the year before. And most of them were great books, too! Here's a summary of what I learned from each.

Read the article Summarized – Tech and business books I read in 2020