Build the right habits to stay productive on a daily basis
The world is getting more competitive by the day. Being consistently productive is one of the biggest challenges all developers may face on a daily basis. Companies are constantly measuring our performance. It is understandable that we are monitored, but that can lead to anxiety.
What is needed in order to be productive? Aren’t technical skills alone enough? Is there a secret sauce?
The most important thing is to adopt the right habits in your daily routine. It’s like sitting on a chair. …
“KISS,” “DRY”, “YAGNI,” and more
Being a good programmer is a mix of skills and some common sense. It is all about being pragmatic and knowing what is the solution that fits better your problem. When facing a challenge, there are some software principles that will guide you in choosing the most correct approach.
Those are a set of guidelines every developer should know and revisit from time to time. Think about them as your secret sauce when programming.
Consistently applying those principles will make your transition from mid to senior software engineer easier. …
Improve your TypeScript knowledge with these must-know features
TypeScript’s influence is growing by the day. It is now the go-to companion tool for any new web/Node project. The benefits of using TypeScript cannot be overstated. However, it is important to know and understand all the tools that this superset of JavaScript has at our disposal.
Are you investing time in improving your Typescript skills? Are you trying to make the most out of it? Sometimes by not using the right TypeScript’s features and not following its best practices, there can be a lot of code duplication and boilerplate.
In this article, we will be looking at the five…
Tips to avoid memory leaks in your web apps
JavaScript doesn’t provide any memory management primitives. Instead, memory is managed by the JavaScript VM through a memory reclaim process. That process is known as Garbage Collection.
Since we can’t force it to run, how do we know it will work properly? What do we know about it?
- Script execution is paused during the process.
- It frees memory for unreachable resources.
- It is non-deterministic.
- It will not inspect the whole memory in one go but will run in multiple cycles.
- It is unpredictable. It will execute when necessary.
Does that mean we don’t have to worry about resources and memory…
A journey toward finding the right tool for the right job
Flex and Grid were the most welcome changes in the Browser layout history:
- Flexbox was inspired by popular UI frameworks such as Bootstrap. Its first working draft was published on July 23, 2009. Eleven years later it’s amazing to see that the support for it has just skyrocketed: Its usage is supported on about
99.2%of browsers. - Grid was initially drafted by the Microsoft team and shipped to Internet Explorer 10 in 2011. Nowadays it has great Browser support:
96%. However, Grid is continuously evolving, adding features such assubgridthat might be only available in a small browser subset…
Learn to build your own set of TypeScript’s tooling
Mapped types are by far the best feature in the TypeScript language. They let you create new types base on existing ones and some rules that you define. That does lead to a more readable and declarative code base.
Keeping your code DRY is one of the principles you should follow, and mapped types help you with that. You will find that there is a massive boilerplate reduction. You have to code less as you can reuse more.
Mapped types are a bit of a scary feature to look at first. Especially if there is a knowledge gap. So, before…
If you are using GitHub to store your git repositories, there’s a theme that could make a difference.
Visual Studio Code is a great tool. It is extensible which leads to having a very custom developer experience. The first thing you want to configure is your theme. But how can you choose from so many options? It leads inevitably to the paradox of choice:
“Autonomy and Freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.” — Dr. …
Level up your browser coding skills
Browser dev tools have become essential to doing our job as web programmers. Over the years, vendors have been adding more and more tools to make our development work easier. Each browser has its own quirks and features, but most of them share common ground. Unfortunately for us, Blink-based browsers are the most feature-packed though, and the rest have some ground to cover.
How well do you know the browser dev tools? Are you investing some time in getting familiar with the new features? …
“KISS,” “DRY”, “YAGNI,” and more explained in a fun way
Not long ago, I wrote an article about how consistently applying some software principles would make anybody a better engineer. Today I’m rewriting my article but trying to show the benefits of programmatic programming through memes. As Henrik Ibsen once said: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
1. You Aren’t Gonna Need It—YAGNI
Don’t leave code hanging because you think it might be useful later on.
10 console methods to become a pro console user
We all use the console object to do dummy prints during our long debugging sessions. Debugging is one of those daily tasks that a frontend developer has to face. You might use the debugger or the console object for that.
When using the latter, the majority of developers stick to the most basic console.log() version. However, the console object has an awesome API tailored for different scenarios. Why only stick to one method? Are you making the most of it? Do you want to simplify your debugging experience?
By knowing the ins and outs of the most relevant console methods…
