How Do You Eat An Elephant?

... One bite at a time. My coding bootcamp instructor used to say this when he was met with blank stares of confusion after making quantum leaps from one slippery concept to another. As my kanban lengthens with independent projects and tasks, I remember his words and calming demeanor. Sometimes I have to remind myself that if I'm not challenging myself, I'm not growing.

Today I will focus my efforts on my beloved SoundStock.io . This is my React.js playground. I conquered homemade user authentication using local storage, now on to the user profiles to allow for interconnectivity. Step one will be to brush up on my widow.location() methods to maintain persistence and restrict access. Then, I will update the user models to include "online" and "isDeleted". Currently, those keys are in state, let's add them to the DB. Alright, less talking more coding.

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Why Do I Code?

I've been a paid technology professional for half a decade and this is not my first career. Why do I bother to learn new tech and torture myself with daunting task after daunting task? Well, the brain exercise is great and so is the ultimate sweet satisfaction of writing and deploying a thing that works. I love the alchemy of it all, to forge interactive material FROM NOTHING that can change how we behave is the closest thing to magic we have... other than real magic of course. The overwhelming truth here, is that I code to bring my ideas to life. I wanted to be able to communicate my "million dollar ideas" effectively and drive innovation. Here's an idea, what if we could harness the power of traffic, like wind or water? There may not be a pure software solution for that, but I feel like I need to put that one out there. The idea that motivated me to get into tech, though, is about connecting crowdfunding and publishing/royalty distribution. I called it SoundStock, n...

I Used ChatGPT At Work Today

AI has been fun, interesting, a little bit scary and today, useful. I was having trouble constructing the perfect regex involving a variable number of commas. After spinning my wheels for about 15 minutes and spending another 10 sifting though stack overflow posts, I thought to give ChatGPT a try. It worked like a charm, complete with examples and a detailed explanation. The possibilities are endless. Does this mean we can (or will soon be able to) create anything we can think of? These are exciting times. Here's how I plan to dive in (courtesy of ChatGPT): Understand the basics: Start by familiarizing yourself with the basics of AI, including what it is, how it works, and its applications in various industries. Learn programming: AI is based on programming, so it's essential to learn programming languages like Python, R, Java, or C++. It's also crucial to understand data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles. Explore machine learning: Machine learnin...

What does TDD really mean?

Test Driven Development is... everything. Before we get into specifics, let's consider some advantages of TDD. One major pro is that TDD allows us to easily update software to include new business rules. This directly impacts scalability. Additionally, debugging becomes less painful; we are forced to think critically about what we want our code to actually do; TDD makes us simplify our code, resulting in a quality, clean, maintainable code base. So how is TDD done? There is an idea called Red Green Refactor . "Red" means that we create our test to fail. I like to go ahead and set up my dependencies, implementation method signatures returning null and any method level documentation. Now we write the tests. I'm a fan of JUnit and Mockito for Java and Mocha for Javascript. When you write tests, consider carefully what you want the code to do and account for negative scenarios like bad user input and empty data sets. Naturally, the tests will fail because we r...

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