Part 1: Speaking in machine learning — Last year, my girlfriend and I were apartment hunting in Vancouver, a notoriously expensive city. Walking into a 700 sq foot apartment that’s listed for $2000 (and feels like a shoebox) makes one go “this is crazy.” Having that happen multiple times makes one go “wait, is everyone crazy?” Well…

Military strategist John Boyd on creativity — Creativity doesn’t come from deep study of one particular field. It comes from combining ideas from multiple fields. In fact, there’s no such thing as a truly original idea. Innovative ideas are just existing concepts, rearranged in novel ways. To expand this idea, let’s look at the career of John…

What the heck is serverless? — Why you should care about AWS Lambda: - it’s one of the most popular services on Amazon Web Services (AWS)… or at least one of the most talked about - it’s an incredibly cheap way to build your application - it’s a big part of AWS’s “serverless” architecture Which…

How to accelerate your growth — Beginnings The moment I decided to become a software developer, I was sitting in the basement of a hostel in Peru. This was 2015. In 2014, I had graduated university with a degree in English Literature. But what was I supposed to do now? (For those considering a degree in literature…

Five points to remember — Writing this article started with a question: if I could give a new developer one piece of advice to help them write great React, what would it be? My answer: write clean components by following the rules of writing clean functions. Why focus on writing components? Our goal is to write React applications that are…

Decide which GraphQL library is right for you — Introduction So you’re decided to try GraphQL in React. You’ve read the articles extolling how it is the future. You’ve seen its usage spread to major tech players. And the developers you know won’t shut up about it. Now what? Well, the two major libraries for adding GraphQL to your React…

Using the Single Responsibility Principle to build better apps — The advantage of the component system in React (and view libraries like it) is that your UI gets split into small, digestible, reusable chunks. Each component is usually compact (100–200 lines), a size which is easy for other developers to understand and modify. But while component brevity tends to be…

The path to slimmer controllers and models — Imagine you have a controller with some complex business logic. class UserController < ApplicationController def create user = User.new(user_params) if user.save send_welcome_email notify_slack if @user.admin? log_new_admin else log_new_user end redirect_to new_user_welcome_path else render 'new' end end

A revised and up-to-date guide to the new React component lifecycle — Since my first article on this subject, the React component API has changed significantly. Some lifecycle methods have been deprecated, and some new ones have been introduced. So it’s time for an update! (See how I resisted making a shouldArticleUpdate joke? That’s restraint.) Since the lifecycle API is a bit…