My struggles with React Testing Library

12th May 2021

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.

Cost Driven Development

4th March 2021

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.

Hello 2021, I'm late to the party

7th February 2021

Hello friends, it's been a while since I published anything on this blog, it's been so long since I last posted anything that it is a little embarrassing. I have gone off the grid because I was just a little occupied from a few personal projects in the past few months. With that said, the Xmas break was a perfect time to recharge my batteries.

How to share a Roam page with others?

30th September 2020

Roam is still in active development right now, which means some common features in other note-taking app is not quite as easy to use here. One of these features is the ability to share a single page of note with friends or family. In this blog post, I'll show you how to do this properly.

Boost your productivity with Google Calendar shortcuts

22nd September 2020

I use Google Calendar, both personally and professionally. I have a shared calendar with a friend to keep track of different events and activities. I have always found it hard to navigate Google Calendar in the browser, I love the look and feel of the web app, though I find myself always looking for the right buttons, etc. I knew about the brilliant shortcuts that made Gmail fun to use and decided to see if Google Calendar offered something similar. Luckily, they do, and they are straightforward to remember.

Time to go back to the fundamentals of software development?

10th September 2020

With all the new toys coming out each day, libraries, frameworks and even architectures. Have we forgotten the fundamentals of software development? Every developer wants to write good code, but how often do we do what we say? Maybe, every so often we all need to take a step back and rethink our approaches to software development. If nothing else, we should find challenges and excitement in what we do, if only to make sure the passion that drove us to this career path doesn't die out.

What's new with TypeScript 4.0?

21st August 2020

TypeScript 4.0 just came out, and people probably want to be upgrading to it soon. Here's a quick summary of what's new based on official release notes. This is only meant to be a quick summary, so I have left out edge cases and detailed examples. If you have time, I'd recommended giving the official release note a proper read. But for those who want to get a high-level gist of what changed, this might be useful.

Running client side only JavaScript with Gatsby.js

12th August 2020

Gatsby is great for generating static sites, but sometimes we need to run some client-side only JavaScript as well. The question is how might we go about that? Well, that's what I'll be covering in this blog post. Actually, I've already written about something similar in a recent post Render client-side only component in Next.js. The approach is very similar, but I'll be walking through an example in this blog that is more specific to Gatsby.