I’ve been working for about nine months at Dexter as a software developer. I wrote a blog post about landing the job initially, as well as a technical post about a self positioning component I made in my first couple of months at the company. Getting a job was my initial goal, and keeping it and growing as a developer was the natural next step forward.

My thoughts about my role have changed significantly since I started. I thought being a developer was about cranking out code as quickly as possible. It’s the furthest thing from reality. Banging out a…

A big thanks to Dexter engineering specifically Daniel Ilkovich and David Hu for letting me share this code and all of their help and support while building the user tutorial feature on our site.

While React has ways to break the hatch and directly manipulate the DOM there are very few reasons to do this. We shouldn’t directly manipulate the DOM unless we have a really good reason to. When we need to we should use the ref property. Only as a last resort should we manipulate the DOM directly as well as change state during a render.

The Problem

The grid…

Breaking into a new industry or role is difficult. Learning a new set of skills and getting a job using them is just that, difficult. You could even say it’s O(n)² difficult.

Now try competing for that same role in a market saturated with other folks in your same shoes. Most good things in life aren’t easy, but they are worth fighting for.

In my case, my new job gave me a 20% pay increase from my former role as a project manager. And now, I’m also doing work that invigorates me.

I’ve seen a bunch of posts with technical…

React forces you to think about data differently in general. I’ve made a couple of different small projects, but now it’s starting to click. I’m starting to understand how state works and what the advantages are to using it. Additionally Reacts lifecycle components further let you control your data and how it needs to flow. If you want to dig a little deeper into my code outside of the examples I show heres a link to my project on github. While the app is only about 170 lines of code, using state probably saved me a whole bunch of code…

Yeah, this shit again. Javascript, you weirdo. What’s going on here?

It’s taken me quite a bit of time to really understand the topic. This and this are both great blog posts relating to the subject. You Don’t Know JS by Kyle has really beaten the concept into my thick skull. If you have time it’s worth reading the series. You won’t regret it. Also, you can buy the book on this and prototypes here. I don’t have enough nice thing’s to say about the series so far.

One last thing: I strongly recommend playing with this code in your…

Hi There!

I’m writing this partially to promote Coursera’s Angular 1.5.X course but really this more of a log to further cement what I’ve learned (and show it off a little too :D).

Before I start, I’d highly recommend learning how to learn (which is also on Coursera). If there’s one take away I have from this course it’s all about context and listening to your body. If you’re grabbing the core context of what you’re trying to pick up you’re not going to truly grasp the skills you’re trying to learn. …

I guess the first question I usually get is why Angular 1? Isn’t that so 2015? What about Angular 2 and React? They’re super cool, right? Yes, they are! No doubts about it.

The reason I’m learning Angular 1 is simply for two reasons. 1. that’s where all of the jobs are, and will most likely remain for a while. 2. It’s a proven framework. When your online bank is using angular 1 you know that you can trust it’s at a pretty mature place. A nice thing is that it has a component system like Angular 2 in Angular…