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Get a quick win

We have a tough time starting but just as hard a time not finishing what we've started, especially if we have had even a tiny bit of success. You'll eventually lose motivation when you've set out to do something that takes a long time.

How I write articles

"How does Balint write these articles?" asked probably nobody, ever. So you didn't ask, and I still delivered. Below is my current method of writing. 1. Write a crappy first draft I put words down almost as they appear in my mind. As Stephen King says,

You can do it - just start

The saying "If you think you can win, or if you think you cannot, you're right" has a lot of truth to it. Staring at a computer screen with a daunting task ahead can feel overwhelming. You have to think about, code, fix, test, and refactor

Write a forum post

You can use a simple technique that gets you unstuck when you've been banging your head against the wall because of a problem you can't figure out. You tried everything to debug it, changing one thing at a time to see if it affected the outcome,

Setting up a TypeScript project

This year, I decided to learn TypeScript, or more precisely, to improve my very basic knowledge of the most popular flavor of JavaScript. I know some basic TS and I use ExecuteProgram to improve my knowledge each day but I believe that nothing makes you learn faster than building stuff

Just start over

I was on the cusp of finishing a complex component. The changes looked good locally so I pushed to CI, waiting for the green check mark and the immediate dopamine kick. Bang, a red cross. What the #!^^? Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded the log read when running the

[FAIL] Don't fix the same problem twice

And then it all made sense. The app uses band slugs (like "led-zeppelin") for ids, so the band_id was a string. In ruby, 'string'.to_i is 0, which is why all songs had a band_id of 0, and they didn't show up for any of the bands.

[FAIL] VS Code auto-import breaking the build

I learned about the idea of being a señor engineer and publishing your fails during your work from Kenneth Larsen [https://www.kennethlarsen.org/] a few years ago. I really liked the idea but haven't had a single fail since then 😂 so you guys had to wait for

Understanding Svelte – Indicating loading state

In the last post of building the crypto card series (aka. "Understanding Svelte"), we tuned the async bits and added some animation to improve user feedback. We'll now continue down that path and indicate to the user while data (bitcoin prices) are being fetched. We'

Animate chess pieces with ember-animated

I've used ember-animated [https://github.com/ember-animation/ember-animated/] in the Sac Sac Mate app in several places: to animate the list being resorted [https://devjournal.balinterdi.com/using-ember-animated-to-resort-a-list/] and to move the player's photo from the list to the details page [https://devjournal.balinterdi.com/adding-fly-over-animation-from-list-to-details/

Understanding Svelte – Tuning asynchrony and animation basics

In this post, we'll improve the opening of the historical prices panel so that it's not blocked by network requests and then add a simple opening animation.

Understanding Svelte – Simple event handling and some more reactivity

The last time [https://devjournal.balinterdi.com/understanding-svelte-reactivity-part-1/] we built a small crypto card (more like a label) that showed the current price of Bitcoin. In this post, we'll expand that to show historical prices. We'd like to end up with something like the following, only