Strings and Things

Testing is a subject that nearly every tutorial and course tends to gracefully skip over. This is tragic because as soon as you enter the workforce as a developer, you’re going to be expected to write tests. You may even find yourself writing more…

Whoa! Lee, Why are you writing about terminal commands? I thought this was a front-end blog? Listen. I contain multitudes. Plus, you’re gonna run across a permissions issue at some point regardless of where you hang out in the stack, so why not…

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have been huge buzzwords in the Tech industry for quite some time. Hearing them might make you picture self-driving cars or chat bots in your head and leave you wondering what kind of programming goes…

JAMstack is one of those buzzwords that leaves the listener confused whenever it’s uttered (see also PWAs, blockchain, and serverless). Despite the name, JAMstack is a fantastic choice for front-end web applications, and definitely worth your time…

React’s context API is awesome. As someone that looked at Redux as a junior developer and instantly felt defeated, learning about context was a relief. I used it in my apps, quickly forgot about Redux, and never looked back. That is, until I heard…

Have you ever heard the story of the QWERTY layout on a keyboard? The popular legend is that it was too easy to type if the letters were arranged alphabetically, and this caused mechanical typewriters to jam. The most common letters were too close…

Being a front-end developer is a bit like being a cowboy in a rodeo. As a developer, you’ll find yourself wrangling a new framework over and over because of the speed at which the front-end landscape evolves. Sure, learning comes with the territory…

I think a lot of new developers, myself included, are really excited about CSS until it comes time to start building more modern website features like menus. I remember building my first site, feeling empowered by CSS to do my own styles, and feeling…

Redux is one of those technologies that I consider a “personal Everest”. Everytime I look at it, I feel like there’s no end to the boilerplate and patterns to memorize. At my first job and the first codebase I worked on, we had to use NGRX (Angular…

If the React docs leave you in the dust, or Dan Abramov’s blog makes you feel like you’re reading a scroll handed down from Mt Olympus written in ancient Greek, you’re not alone. Sometimes the pantheon of React Gods have a hard time translating…

In my time as a front-end developer, I’ve seen and heard a lot of gripes about CSS. I often see people reach for a CSS framework like Bootstrap, Materialize, Bulma, Tailwind, etc. to avoid writing CSS. While CSS frameworks can be great accelerators,…

Once I overheard someone describe a kid they met that knew he wanted to be a podiatrist 👣👨‍⚕️ at age 6. This story is not about that person. My life has been rife with indecision. In fact, a good friend once described me as the “male Barbie of…

Learning to code something new can be a painful process. We inevitably get stuck or frustrated as we stumble through new concepts and ideas. I’ve learned some hard concepts as a programmer. I’ve started from scratch in a new language as well as…

If you’ve ever thought, “meh… I’m fine with console.log, learning to debug is as painful as rolling in fire ants”, this article is for you! Console Confessional Me and console.log are like this: 🤞. It’s been my go-to solution for all things weirdJS…

I started the Tech Jr podcast with my co-host Eddie in April of this year. We haven’t been around for very long, but we’ve had some great success reaching developers in our community and beyond with helpful advice and knowledge. I’ve been asked a few…

Welcome to my blog! I’m a front-end developer, meetup organizer, podcast host, and I get paid for some of those things. Before we start, I’m not saying you have to be or do all those things to be successful. Making software is really my only metric…