1. Strings are definitely strings right? Well… kind of: You’ve probably heard that in Javascript “everything’s an object” right? In fact strings are both objects and strings at the same time:

1. Adding console logs to render expressions — If you wanna log the props to an expression style component but can’t be bothered to convert it, put the log in parentheses then add chopsticks ||: Note. you have to use the or operator because console.log returns undefined. 2. Trace a function’s call with the Error object If you’ve no idea where a function’s being called from, log…

Shortcuts for the initiated — Number Rather than going to the effort of typing the Number constructor you can just wrap a number (in parens) to access number functions… Number(20).toFixed(); // lame! 20.toFixed(); // Error! (JS thinks this is a decimal) (20).toFixed(); // thumbsup! Also, the toFixed function is a quick way to make a number…

Real world Test Driven Development — How many web tutorials have you watched where someone builds a simple todo list? How many simple todo lists have you been asked to build for money? Not many? No me neither. Rather than use a contrived example app I’m writing a series of posts that follow my work on…

Remote developer platforms in the global economy — I watched a interview clip with Arthur C Clarke some time ago. It’s the 60s and he’s standing in a room of huge computers, the kind they made back then that used tape memory—my dad often reminds me of the computer installed at his grammar school, there was a whole…

ChatGPT was released by OpenAI to crazed excitement from the dev community a couple of months back. …

From a programmer who was home educated — Me and my partner watch a documentary series called Child Genius that follows a yearly competition to find the UK's smartest under 10 year old. The fascination with smart kids — how smart they are, what learning styles they use, how they behave, what their parents are like — as…

How it’s often useful to learn things no one asks you to — They’re used to structure Blockchains, which is why you might have heard of them, but also you might not know that Git uses Merkle Trees to store commits and compare diffs between files. In the corporate world, aka at work, the conceptual stuff tends to take a back seat. I’m…

Doing the jobs no one else wants to do You ever seen the movie Social Network or watched the series Silicon Valley? These two shows basically summed up how I imaged getting into web development would be.