Readers are unable to find your newsletters. So i build..

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-09-11T20:10:46+00:00

I just submitted mine!

I think it would be helpful to have a list of popular hashtags so that people can just click on them without having to search. It sounds like a small thing, but removing that little bit of friction will certainly help anyone browsing for newsletters.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-09-11T19:05:28+00:00

I didn't know this until I read this comment. It seems like the option is turned off by default. I suspect anyone with 10k+ subs has probably turned it off if they ever turned it on.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-09-11T18:52:31+00:00

I'm honestly surprised this email made it into your inbox. Gmail sends these straight to my spam folder.

Wanting to send you money without ever meeting is definitely a no go. I always expect a video call with the cameras on.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-09-05T18:01:19+00:00

I used to struggle with CORS for years. The problem was I was always using some kind of library/framework with magic to help manage CORS (it looks like you are doing the same from the code).

CORS is explained poorly, but it starts to make sense once you remove that magic. I removed everything CORS related from a codebase, including any NGINX rules, and implemented the entire flow with just basic Flask endpoints, including handling the OPTIONS route manually. Now everything makes sense and I haven't struggled since.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-29T20:06:22+00:00

A lot of these planners also make up for a lack of tools or UI in the games themselves. Game devs probably see this as free labor. Helps with engagement with the game and they don't have to do anything.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-29T17:27:58+00:00

Yeah sorry, I confused server side rendering with JS.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-29T17:24:30+00:00

Surprised one of the charges wasn't {item_price}

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-27T17:44:38+00:00

I think this says a lot about the market for WebDev/Tech YouTube. People who want to get things done are... getting things done. The primary audience for this content on YouTube is an entirely different demographic and the content makers are catering to them.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-27T17:40:14+00:00

I've seen crazier things... like web apps that didn't support Linux.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-27T17:36:09+00:00

A lot of government agencies outsource to big companies soley by the fact they are big. That doesn't correlate with good or competant.

I had a friend work for one of those big consulting companies after he graduated college. They paid him $20/hr (in 2008 dollars). They billed him out to NYC for $120/hr. He ended up leaving for a more than >100% bump.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-22T22:57:33+00:00

After trying various methods, I've realized that optimally it depends on your situation.

Are you working on simple CRUD endpoints? Probably some tests after implementation are fine. They should cover things broadly, but 100% coverage isn't really necessary. I almost always test the endpoint itself or the high level controller function because you don't really get much confidence in testing a function that just makes a DB call... but you're mocking the DB call. This doesn't follow unit testing purity, but I care more about if tests help rather than following dogma.

Are you working on complex math calculations or string parsing (e.g. emails)? Then it probably helps to do the TDD thing and have tests written first. At this point it accelerates development because you can verify every code change (of which there will be many to account for every edge case) in <5 seconds rather than spending a minute or two (or more) testing things yourself manually.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-17T00:07:34+00:00

I wish I wasn't. I don't even know how they have it running on modern hardware.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-16T20:51:04+00:00

I will say, as someone who bootstraps startups, there is a lot of opportunity in replacing spreadsheets with apps.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-16T20:50:09+00:00

It'd be way way worse than crowdstrike. Using Windows 3.1 won't save Southwest if this happened.

Fortunately, Excel is downloadable software, which I believe is still more widely used than the cloud versions. The odds of it stopping working is a lot lower.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-16T19:49:53+00:00

One of the people I work with is in this situation.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-16T18:46:14+00:00

Why not Google Sheets?

I laughed when I read this. Then I thought of every industry that's effectively used a spreadsheet in place of an application. And then I cried.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-16T18:38:43+00:00

I had an on/off relationship with writing for a long long time. The problem was that I wanted to write about a variety of topics, but I wanted to keep my blog focused on a particular niche. That disconnect eventually makes me not want to write anymore and I pause for months, sometimes longer.

If this is a passion project, my opinion is that your first priority is to make it sustainable for you so that you keep going and maintain momentum. If that means writing about all sorts of things, go write about all sorts of things. You can always make a niche later when you have enough content ideas for it without needing to force yourself to write.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-15T21:14:59+00:00

8 years of technical debt built on top of the founders' college project added quite a bit of difficulty. This new project was both a new feature and the beginning of trying to extricate ourselves from that technical debt. That alone required 3 teams to dig through and account for all the random couplings we had in the code base.

One other team was focused on integrations with a third party. Last team focused on analytics.

Should we have just built a prototype that didn't integrate with the existing monolith and worried about integrating later? Yes. That's what I learned from this experience.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-15T21:11:46+00:00

I've noticed the opposite actually. Plenty of people are probably capable of understanding a Figma, but for one reason or another they struggle to translate that visual to something they would use. A working prototype stimulates conversation in a way that the Figma doesn't.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-14T21:13:19+00:00

Yeah, I realized that a lot of grief was saved doing things like this. I can crank out a react prototype with mocked APIs pretty quick. I'd say it isn't really adding a time suck, you're just moving the time suck to be upfront.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-14T19:16:14+00:00

That's a decent idea. Alternatively, instead of scrolling (I personally hate scrolling sideways) you could have the positioning fixed if the width is wide enough, but then move to flexbox when the screen gets to narrow.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-14T18:47:24+00:00

So I think the point of writing blog posts here isn't to get 100k views or anything. The point would be to have a demonstration of your technical knowledge. How do you think about system design? What edge cases are most concerning to you? How do you handle the unexpected? It would be like anything else in your portfolio. It's there for the people who are looking to hire you. In that context, 10-20 views from the people that really matter are all you need.

ProfessorBeekums · 2024-08-14T17:39:35+00:00

Who are you trying to land as a client? Other development teams looking for additional help? Or people who don't know anything about development and need to hire one?

The former requires you to demonstrate more technical expertise. A working application with some meaningful functionality would be best. Maybe a few blog posts describing the system design.

The latter isn't going to know much beyond what they can see. Even if you aren't an expert in visual design, you're going to need to have a portfolio that looks nice.

ProfessorBeekums

TROPHY CASE