Stop using 108 console logs in your NodeJS app to debug your API endpoints. I used to employ this same method of saturating my code with logs until a wiser developer showed our team how to pause execution using VSCode.

The problem with relying on tons of logging is that it quickly becomes confusing, especially when dealing with asynchronous logic. Now your console log in that promise is being called out of order or perhaps you logged a deeply nested object and your console only prints [object] . Aarrggghhh. You hammer the endpoint with more and more requests, add more…

It’s release day at Vincent’s company! In just a few minutes all the new code for their different applications will be released into the wild. His team is feeling confident about a particular feature and hoping things go smoothly. After the site goes live Vince immediately receives a Pager Duty alert. Ruh roh.

It appears an API is returning 500s when processing customer credit cards. A quick investigation into the issue reveals the root cause: a simple property name mismatch. …

Several years ago I was working with a tech stack that I didn’t particularly enjoy. One of the frameworks in that stack started with an ‘Angular’ and ended with a ‘JS’ 😉. I was just beginning my career and knew that to be more marketable I was going to need to learn a more modern framework. Heck, even Angular was abandoning AngularJS.

I left my former company to join a small startup where I learned EmberJS which I enjoyed enough (kinda) but the market for Ember developers is fairly niche. ReactJS dominated the list of skills employers were looking for…

Let’s face it. The majority of us who write code for a living won’t be the next Kyle Simpson or Stephen Grider. Even within our own teams, there are those members who just seem to write the kind of code which you envy. They’ve been programming for decades or maybe they truly are a genius. You pore over their code, hoping to glean some wisdom from them, only to realize it may be years before you reach their level of mastery.

Technical proficiency doesn’t always parallel career trajectory in software, as it shouldn’t. At the most basic level, software teams…

Six years ago I transitioned careers at 30 to become a software developer. Since then, I’ve worked at 4 different companies and been promoted to senior developer. At each stage of my career I’ve had a not-so-small voice in the back of my head questioning whether I was really qualified to be in my current position. Was it luck? Did my presence help to fill some diversity quota? Did they make a terrible mistake by hiring me, I wondered. It was just a matter of time before I was caught!

Luckily, I’ve never been “caught” as an impostor at any…

Years ago, a very sharp mathematician turned software developer asked me if I knew anything about functional programming. ‘No’ I replied. I saw the gleam in his eye as he rose from his seat to walk over to the whiteboard where an hour-long impromptu lecture would begin.

He furiously drew a spattering of math on the board. There were pointy hats over numbers, I think an infinity symbol entered the picture. There were many functions… so many functions. They all kinda looked like this f(g(x))

It was amazing! At the end of that hour, I knew just as much about…

It was done! Finally, after days of poring over the code and refining the logic, I was happy to say I’d finally finished the task. The output: a beautiful 100+ line if/else statement! Seriously.

I was about 2 months into my first job as a software developer and recently tasked with porting one of our applications from a legacy code base to our new web app. …

I am going to try my best not to use any played out jokes regarding recursion in this piece, but being well into my career as a father, there are no guarantees.

The idea of recursion is actually pretty simple: a function that calls itself. Now, putting this principle in practice to write something useful is another bag of beans. Let’s take a look at the function below, which is technically recursive but is missing a very important ingredient:

const countDown = (num) => {
  console.log(num);  
  countDown(num - 1);
}countDown(10);// 10
// 9
// 8
// 7
//...

…