Have you wondered how companies like Heroku, Netlify and Vercel host and run your applications on a single domain? Is that even safe? What if people try to set/get cookies in other people's sub-domain or root domain? I recently ran into this problem at work, and we ended up going down the rabbit hole of how it all works. I was pleasantly surprised by how it all works, so let's talk about it!

In a recent project, my team decided to use Mock Service Worker (MSW) in our unit tests. It was meant to be a very straightforward change since the documentation for MSW is pretty clear. I encountered a few errors along the way that had me scratching my head. I'm going to document them here, hopefully will help people in a similar situation.

If you are not aware, DigitalOcean now offers their own App Platform which works like Netlify or Vercel if you used those platforms before. If not, essentially you could connect your code repository and then these platforms will take care of the rest e.g. install dependencies, building the project and deploying it somewhere, host it, manage SSL certificates, custom domains, etc.

Following on from the previous blog post on How to setup Single Page Applications with Auth0 in the local environment without CORS issues, I noticed another area that is very vague in the official docs and thought I'd share my finding in this post. It turns out Auth0 provided everything we needed just didn't tell us how to use it.

I used Auth0 in a Single Page Application (SPA) side project recently, because I didn't want to spend the time to build all the auth related features e.g. password reset, sign up, etc. Surprisingly it was extremely painful to get it working locally due to HTTPS, CORS and localhost issues. In this blog post, I'll be walking my final setup with all of that working locally.

Yarn 2, aka Berry, was announced back in April 2019, it was a pretty big deal at the time. I've moved 2 clients since and still, no one is talking about it. I got curious recently and did some research about this topic. In this post, we'll see what is the deal with Yarn 2, and what the adoption is like after 2 years.

I've worked for many companies over the years since I'm in the field of consulting/contracting. It allowed me to see how teams do things differently and the pros/cons of each approach. In this blog, I want to share some of my observations on using Docker for local development.

It's been a while since I had to recall the reasons why React uses Virtual DOM. I was recently asked this in an interview, and I did an okay job explain it but not to the extent I wanted. So I spent some time re-reading the official documentation and wrote down some notes. I hope these will be helpful for anyone preparing for a React interview. Also, I have called out the vital part of each section to make it easier to see the key points.

Open any software development book, and there is probably a section on testing and why it is essential. Testing is a great feedback tool. If you think about it, it is incredible how we can write code and then write other code to check the initial bit of code. I can't think of many professions out there who can automatically validate and verify their work like us software engineers.

Are you a fellow software engineer who had great product or business ideas then abandoned them? Have you been put off the idea due to hosting and running costs? I think we can all agree that it would be a shame if a million pounds idea got buried due to early-stage costs. At the same time, we need to do our best to navigate the money-grabbing realities of SaSS and platforms out there. Sure, a few pounds for a domain here and a few pounds to spin up a server there might not sound much on their own. However, when combined, they could quickly deplete our savings, which is not what we want. Continue reading, and I'll be sharing some of my thoughts and tips around how to cheaply or even create side projects for free.