This is for myself, to remember my feelings and learnings from this unique time.

A Realization

I had planned for 2020 to be the most important year in my career. This was the year to solidify my career goals concretely beyond “work with great people and make great things.”

I have a career in tech across corporations and startups of varying sizes. I know what kind of teams I want to work with and what kind of teams I want to avoid. For a while, these were the biggest career problems I faced. After a few proving years, having a well-paying job…

Honestly, I thought that Chrome extensions were more effort than they were worth to develop. I thought my extension would have to be useful for other people on the Chrome Web Store. Here’s how I was wrong.

Skip to “Making the Extension” if you just want the goods.

The Use Case

I work at The Zebra. It’s a neat place with smart software engineers collaborating on interesting problems.

Any place that has software engineers has people griping and sniping about their tools. We’re craftspeople and take pride in our efficiency.

At The Zebra, we have an expectation that developers will squash their commits…

This is a step-by-step guide to building your own serverless React app with the practicality afforded by Next.js and the Firebase ecosystem.

After reading about Next.js’s new serverless mode and attending ServerlessDays ATX, I got the itch to wire up a simple example for a Firebase-flavored serverless app.

Read before you proceed: Firebase bundles all of your functions together and doesn’t natively support per-function bundling. A sufficiently large app with many routes may run into scaling issues. See this comment.

I wrote this all before I found this out so I’m publishing this anyway. Proceed if you dare!

First, let’s…

Redux is a popular state management library for JavaScript apps that is routinely paired with frameworks like React or Angular. What follows is an explanation of how I’ve used Redux to make a production vanilla JS app more maintainable.

I’m hoping this is useful for anyone out there who is looking for a real-world Redux + vanilla JS example beyond a button incrementer or to-do app.

Background

Let’s go back to late 2017/early 2018. The subject app is in production and has ~8 engineers actively developing. This ain’t your trendy universal React app. It’s purpose-built for managing content for our company.

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Writing software for people is satisfying! Each feature is an opportunity to create a well-measured solution to a problem. In modern software development, we aren’t just asked to solve these problems. We are also expected to delight our users.

I’ve found that when our job is to delight users, we can get lost in details. Mapping data from a database to UI elements on the screen is easier than ever. We’re tempted to rush through simple problems to spend extra time on more flashy interaction effects or ultra-efficient code.

Sometimes that results in unreliable code with a pretty veneer.

It…