Randall articles - 23 total
🏖️ Going Against the Grain
I was reflecting recently on habits and practices I have that go against the common wisdom of the...
🏁🐘Winning Race Conditions With PostgreSQL
Race conditions suck! They can be extremely difficult to debug, and often only occur naturally in...
❓The Inquisitive Code Reviewer
Have you ever felt that code reviews can feel adversarial, like a contest of egos? The reviewer...
Does anyone else hate Jest?
I'm usually not this full of hatred, I promise, but lately I've realized that I really hate...
🤖Discord Bot Programmed ... in Discord!
Meet my bot Kiryu. His specialty is downloading JavaScript code from a Discord channel and executing...
🏺Database Architecture - History Over State
What should a database store? There are two broad ways of thinking about it: A database should...
🤔 What Fetch Examples Always Miss
Most examples of using fetch() are missing something very important. Here it is: if (!response.ok)...
🙏Please, specify your units! 📏
What sucks about this code? const success = myCache.mset([ {key: "myKey", val: obj, ttl:...
⚡ When Faster Isn't Better
Lately I keep hearing about Bun, a new JavaScript runtime meant to compete with Node.js and Deno....
🎩The Magic of || and && in JavaScript
In JavaScript, it's common to see code like this: const color = options.color || 'red'; ...
⚗️ Testing Tips: Fetch, Process, Store
One of the trickiest things about automated testing is dealing with I/O. Automated tests that call...
Don't parse CSVs by hand!
I've seen custom JavaScript code to parse CSV data a number of times. It looks something like...
Discord Webhook Powered Contact Form
Recently more and more people have been discovering the power of personal Discord servers. You can...
🗑️ Delete the Code Until it (Kinda) Works
Have you ever needed to make a change that breaks a huge amount of code spread across your entire...
👻The Nightmarishly Dangerous Default Behavior of setInterval()
So you want to send an HTTP request every delay number of milliseconds. Easy: setInterval( ()...
JavaScript String Encoding Gotchas
What do these three lines of code have in common? const len = str.length; Enter fullscreen...
🦸 Become a Super Hero by Learning SQL!
Knowing SQL frequently makes me feel like a superhero. And I wouldn't even say I'm an expert at it....
Toptal: My Experience
I have seen Toptal mentioned more and more recently, and since I worked through Toptal for almost two...
🚪 Really exit!
Here's a funny (and really unimportant) thing I discovered about Node.js today. First, for anyone...
GitLab CI Inheritance Sucks
Or at least, cross-repo inheritance. I've worked at a couple of places now where GitLab CI templates...
🗿 Stoicism and the Software Interview
Interviewing is hard, and software engineers have it especially bad. In what other profession is your...
Type-Safe TypeScript
Have you ever wished that TypeScript were a bit more, you know, type-safe? Have you ever had a...
JavaScript's Forgotten Keyword (with)
Being a JavaScript developer can be an exciting job. Almost every day you will find something...