Know your tools – and hone them

Software development is much more than churning out code and learning new programming languages or frameworks, which is a fact I'm also trying to prove with this book. All good craftsmen know their tools inside out. We, software developers, are craftsmen, too, and should do likewise. Tools everywhere

Take regular breaks

You know the feeling. You've been pounding at an issue for hours and haven't made any progress – yet, it feels like you're almost there. When you finally get up, your back is sore, your mouth is dry, and your problem is still unresolved. You

Break it down

There is a simple practice that takes little time but has significant benefits. Before you start working on a non-trivial task, write down a list of items that you need to do to accomplish the task. Breaking up the big task into smaller pieces will make it easier to start,

Dive into other people's code

Being able to read other people's code is a force multiplier for becoming a stellar software developer. When using open-source software, you'll undoubtedly need to examine code someone else wrote to better understand it. Many times, you get to that point when you're debugging

Be curious about your craft

"Be interested" sounds like telling you to fall in love with a particular person. I'll grant you it's similar, but being curious about the aspects of software development is much simpler. Which is great because it's essential for your career as a

Write it down - use notes to keep a second brain

There is only so much stuff you can keep in your brain. Sometimes, when I'm keeping track of all the information needed to understand a certain problem, I run out of memory. My FIFO*-based brain throws out the first piece of information to make space for the

Avoid distractions - and focus intensely

It's a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason: if you want to solve challenging problems, you need to focus for an extended period. The fiercest enemy of sustained attention is our devices. They are all connected to the internet and are inexhaustible sources of

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

[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

[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

svelte

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'

animation

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/

svelte

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.

svelte

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

svelte

Understanding Svelte – Reactivity (part 1)

Last time I wrote about the basics of Svelte and Svelte components [https://devjournal.balinterdi.com/understanding-svelte-the-very-basics/]. At the end we rendered a "crypto tab" on screen that displayed a static price. So in this post, let's fetch the actual spot price of Bitcoin and display

svelte

Understanding Svelte – The (very) basics

I have to admit, Svelte caught my attention. It takes a totally different approach than other JavaScript UI libraries or frameworks for keeping the UI up-to-date with changes triggered by data changes or user interactions. Instead of re-rendering the appropriate segments of the UI at runtime, it prepares the work

ember.js

Adding autoplay to games

The main feature I added this week to Sac Sac Mate is the ability to autoplay a game, so that the user doesn't have to click (or tap) the "make next move" potentially a hundred times to see a game all the way to the end.

chess

30 Weird Chess Algorithms

A guy who says is bad at chess and doesn't like playing online first makes a papier-mache robot to play against and then implements 30 (yes, 30!) different chess algorithms and makes them compete against each other.

ember.js

Setting link activeness – the modern way

I realize a blog post with "modern" in its title regarding a JavaScript framework will be laughed at a few years down the line, but it makes for a catchy title. "Setting link activeness – in 2019" reads worse. The Sac Sac Mate app [https://sac-sac-mate.com]