At a startup, if you have a working/semi working product that is demonstrable (demo-able) the last thing you need is for your product to unexpectedly crash during a demonstration/ sales meeting/ investor meeting. I was recently talking to a startup founder who was not able to demonstrate key features of…

When I interview candidates I ask them what techniques they have to identify tough bugs. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the techniques I use (in no particular order): Read the stack trace Go to the last line in the code indicated to be an issue in the…

A good friend has started up a new business Blinds In Print. It’s an online store that sells made to order blinds with custom designs from a range of designers. The site uses the following technologies: Wordpress WooCommerce Tawk.to jQuery Let’s step through and have a a look at the…

Someone said to me earlier this week that it is too hard to debug a single line JavaScript arrow function. So here are some techniques to do it: With console.log() const sum = values => values.reduce((agg, curr) => (console.log(curr), agg + curr), 0); We are using a technique here in…

We are going to setup a new macOS computer to run React Native and simulate an iOS and Android device on your mac. These instructions have been tested on macOS Sierra 10.12 using the following tools react@15.6.1 react-native@0.47.1 react-native-cli@2.0.1 We will be walking through Creating a new React Native app …

Tasks have a lower limit. Tasks can’t be done in zero seconds. Tasks can’t be done in negative time. All tasks take time, but there is no upper time limit for a task. I recently tried to do something relatively simple, converting a webpage to PDF. I thought it would…

3rd Party APIs can save you time and money What’s a 3rd Party API? Third party APIs are APIs provided by other parties (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc) to allow you to access their functionality and use it in your own app. Examples You could spend years building your own email delivery platform, or you could…