Randall

Randall @mistval

About: I'm a coder who has worn a lot of hats, from individual contributor to lead engineer to "CTO" (yes, in quotes, make of that what you will!). I've plenty to learn and hopefully some to share as well.

Joined:
Jun 20, 2020

Randall
articles - 20 total

How I Host a Bot in 45,000 Discord Servers For Free

When I talk to other developers about my Discord bot they tend to be surprised that I operate it for...

Learn More 1 0Jul 12

Reflections on Generative AI

AI. It's my turn to talk about it. 🚀 We're in the Future First I have to point out how...

Learn More 10 9Jul 4

🏖️ Going Against the Grain

I was reflecting recently on habits and practices I have that go against the common wisdom of the...

Learn More 10 2Apr 25 '24

🏁🐘Winning Race Conditions With PostgreSQL

Race conditions suck! They can be extremely difficult to debug, and often only occur naturally in...

Learn More 56 4Feb 17 '24

🤖Discord Bot Programmed ... in Discord!

Meet my bot Kiryu. His specialty is downloading JavaScript code from a Discord channel and executing...

Learn More 5 1Apr 28 '23

🏺Database Architecture - History Over State

What should a database store? There are two broad ways of thinking about it: A database should...

Learn More 8 1Apr 2 '23

🙏Please, specify your units! 📏

What sucks about this code? const success = myCache.mset([ {key: "myKey", val: obj, ttl:...

Learn More 6 0Sep 10 '22

⚡ When Faster Isn't Better

Lately I keep hearing about Bun, a new JavaScript runtime meant to compete with Node.js and Deno....

Learn More 7 0Aug 6 '22

🎩The Magic of || and && in JavaScript

In JavaScript, it's common to see code like this: const color = options.color || 'red'; ...

Learn More 9 0Jul 16 '22

Don't parse CSVs by hand!

I've seen custom JavaScript code to parse CSV data a number of times. It looks something like...

Learn More 5 0May 11 '22

Discord Webhook Powered Contact Form

Recently more and more people have been discovering the power of personal Discord servers. You can...

Learn More 15 9Jan 27 '22

👻The Nightmarishly Dangerous Default Behavior of setInterval()

So you want to send an HTTP request every delay number of milliseconds. Easy: setInterval( ()...

Learn More 5 0Jan 8 '22

JavaScript String Encoding Gotchas

What do these three lines of code have in common? const len = str.length; Enter fullscreen...

Learn More 8 0Jan 2 '22

🦸 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....

Learn More 7 0Dec 27 '21

Toptal: My Experience

I have seen Toptal mentioned more and more recently, and since I worked through Toptal for almost two...

Learn More 19 6Dec 25 '21

🚪 Really exit!

Here's a funny (and really unimportant) thing I discovered about Node.js today. First, for anyone...

Learn More 16 5Oct 13 '21

GitLab CI Inheritance Sucks

Or at least, cross-repo inheritance. I've worked at a couple of places now where GitLab CI templates...

Learn More 4 7Oct 2 '21

🗿 Stoicism and the Software Interview

Interviewing is hard, and software engineers have it especially bad. In what other profession is your...

Learn More 10 1Aug 19 '21

Type-Safe TypeScript

Have you ever wished that TypeScript were a bit more, you know, type-safe? Have you ever had a...

Learn More 19 0Jul 30 '21

JavaScript's Forgotten Keyword (with)

Being a JavaScript developer can be an exciting job. Almost every day you will find something...

Learn More 198 14Jul 29 '21