After last year's focus on customer development and agile architecture, the books I read in 2021 mainly focused on three areas: building agile teams, Organization, and Product Strategy.
Read the article Summarized – Tech and business books I read in 2021So 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.
Read the article How to read any startup's source codeI 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.
Read the article Why take-home assignments might not be as bad as their reputationTypeScript 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.
Read the article 10 bad TypeScript habits to break this yearOnly 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.
Read the article TDD in a React frontendMaintaining 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.
Read the article Automating Open-Source on GitHubOne 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.
Read the article What writing my own JSX renderer taught me about ReactIn 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 2020Hacktoberfest is upon us. Starting 1st of October, we will all be celebrating Open Source contributions with tons of swag. But while contributors still have to wait for the 1st of October to get their contributions counted, now is still Preptember: The time to prepare your repositories.
Read the article Preparing your repositories for HacktoberfestIt's the first thing that greets you when you look at an npm package, be it on npm itself or in the source on GitHub: The README.md file. What if, instead of having to update the README file manually whenever your code changes, the README could just stay up-to-date auto-magically?
Read the article Automatically generating README files with jsx-readmeAt some point, each developer encounters the term “dry code”. It comes from the acronym DRY for “Don’t repeat yourself”. But if code is too dry, it easily can become brittle. To keep the code moldable, it is helpful to leave in a bit of repetition - a concept I personally like to call “Moist code”.
Read the article Moist code - Why code should not be completely DRYWriting server code can be messy. For servers this is usually solved with the pattern of middlewares. For AWS lambdas we have multiple ways to handle it.
Read the article Simplify AWS lambda TypeScript functions with middleware
