2020 has been chaotic so far, I hope everything returns to normal soon and best wishes for everyone. On the bright side, now the UK government has recommended people to avoid going to mass gatherings and businesses have told their employees to work remote. It is a perfect time to hammer out some personal projects. I have always struggled to work on personal projects on the side over the years, however, this year I’ve managed to complete 2 projects in 2 months. I know this is a common problem, so I’d love to share my experiences in this post.

VS Code often has you covered when it comes it auto-suggestions and adding in snippets of code. But there will be times where something that is often used by you but isn't provided by VS Code, this is a great opportunity to reach out to the User Snippets feature in VS Code. Where you could add code snippets templates that make it easier to enter repeating code patterns, such as loops or conditional-statements. It is super easy to set up, but there are a few simple things to be aware of to get the best experience with it. We'll talk about these in this blog post.

Following on from a previous post on Database Migration: Knex vs TypeORM vs Sequelize, I’d like to share my experience regarding Sequelize after using it in a commercial project. TLDR, it wasn't as good as I hoped and for the love of God don’t use it with Typescript! Read on to see why.

I recently encountered a problem where we wanted to move some assets to AWS S3 and have AWS CloudFront CDN in front of it. The great benefit of having a CDN is to reduce cost and improve performance. The get the most out of this configuration we want to have the following set up:

Client (Browser) → (no cache) → CloudFront → (cache) → S3

I recently joined a full-stack team, and we decided to shift a prototype app into something that scales better in the future. There were a few decisions made about how we might achieve this goal, one of which is to introduce database migration to our CI/CD pipeline. This blog post will cover the key findings and the final implementation around it.

It is worth noting that at this point, the decision has already been made to go with AWS's Aurora relational database. This is due to there being a lot of relations between data so picking a relational database made sense, and picked Aurora to reduce the amount of maintenance. Although it is possible to hack around and use a document based database instead, but it just means more data duplication and introduces more maintenance headaches.

I recently tried to set up a new project to try out Svelte in more depth. I search everywhere but couldn't get VS Code (e.g. on file save) and Prettier CLI (e.g. running npm run lint) working at the same time. After hours of trial and error, I finally got it to a place I'm happy with. Hopefully, this will help anyone in a similar position.

The world of tech is moving fast, maybe too fast! Trying to keep up with everything is stressful, to say the least, might even call it impossible to be realistic. There are a countless number of frameworks and libraries being update each day and new ones being released as well. Yes, maybe is more of a JavaScript problem, but the same problem more or less applied to other programming languages as well. So how can we find time to enhance our existing skills to be a better developer, while the backlog of learning constantly growing? We are being bombarded with information each day, sooner or later we'd miss demotivated and lose the urge to learn. I've gone through all those stages and feel I have a pretty good balance on how to learn daily but not risk burn out.

A developer who doesn't work on personal projects isn't a true developer! Just kidding! But working on small side projects is an awesome way to solidify and improve our craft. It is both practice and exploration, this is the best opportunity for you to pick up on something others might not know about! In this blog post, I will walk through some of my favourite tools and what I feel is missing in my toolbox.

The experience of installing Linux and getting it running on a machine is just as inconsistent as a year ago and years before that. There were visible improvements, but still plenty room for improvements compared to Windows and Mac OS. I encountered many issues during my little experiment, I ended up switching back to my old setup at the end.

Ever wondered how TV apps are made? How it differs from the usual web app or mobile app development? I was fortunate enough to work on TV platforms for about year now, and there is some exciting stuff for me to share around this subject. I will first give an introduction on TV platforms, then explain why we decided to use web technology to build TV apps, finally I'll go through some of the challenges we faced that are specific to TV app development.