Blog Posts
FrontEnd
How to create a Micro Frontend application using React
A simple how to guide using React
How to add Vue (or another framework) to your React Micro Frontend
Step by step guide on how you can add a different framework to your micro frontend when it's integrated at run time.
How to deploy a run-time micro frontend application using AWS
I'll walk you through creating an S3 bucket to store the code and CloudFront to serve it. We'll also add a simple CI/CD pipeline
Testing
Jest a minute - a better way to structure your unit tests
Gherkin isn't just something you pick off your Big Mac
Jest a minute — how to mock a class
Using 'pdfkit' as an example we will look at how to mock a class and make assertions on it's methods.
TypeScript
Generic Type Parameter
Occasionally you may find yourself writing a function that could take a number of different types. Generics are what you need…
Golang
Golang in sixty seconds - panic
We can use the panic function to cause a runtime error in Golang. This can be useful when paired with the recover function
Golang in sixty seconds - defer
Golang has a special statement called defer which causes the function to be run after the function completes.
Golang in sixty seconds - return multiple values from functions
Golang allows you to return multiple values from a function and to name your return values
Golang in sixty seconds - function basics
Learn the basics of functions in Golang
Golang in sixty seconds - scope
Understanding where your variables can be used from
Golang in sixty seconds - variables
Everything you need to know about creating variables and constants in Go
Golang in sixty seconds - string formatting
There's so much more beyond fmt.Println
Golang in sixty seconds - folders and packages
How to structure your Golang code into folders
Golang in sixty seconds - consuming JSON
Let's look at how you can consume JSON and turn it into a Go type
Golang in sixty seconds - converting to JSON
Marshal those Go types into JSON
Golang in sixty seconds - three dots...
Variadic functions, array literals and more!
Golang in sixty seconds - named return values
and naked return statements!
Golang in sixty seconds - tricks with maps
Maps are pretty useful, find out how to use them to count or group things
Golang in sixty seconds - Pointers
A pointer is the location in memory where a value lives. It’s very important to understand pointers so I’ll give you a cheat sheet to help
Golang in sixty seconds - Count occurrences in a string
Did you ever want to quickly count how many times the letter s appears in Mississippi? Well Go has your back…
Learn Golang with me - Go GUI
Follow along as we take our simple pomodoro timer and make it a graphical application in a few simple steps
Learn Golang with me - Playing with Time
Learn some Time functions in Go while continuing to build our pomodoro timer
Learn Golang with me - How to create a system alert using Golang
In this article I highlight two main methods I found for creating a system alert using Go.
Learn Golang with me
I'll take you through creating a simple pomodoro timer, explaining my decisions along the way.
Working Practices
Take your stand-up to the next level
Make your daily stand-up quicker and more efficient with this simple method
Has COVID killed the daily stand-up?
The meeting that was “for the developers, by the developers” has turned into another status update meeting for middle managers.
5 simple tips to speed up your development environment
I'm pretty lazy, but lazy in a productive way, so I spend a little extra time and effort once so I can be lazy in the future.
Six things that will make you a better developer
Whether you're new to software engineering, or you've been doing it for years, these six things will make you better
Confessions of a Lead Engineer
I hope my boss doesn't read this…
How two babies and a toddler made me a better mentor.
You don't need to be an expert to be a mentor
How to get stuff done when your brain says no
Some tricks to focus when your brain decides you have a million things you must do right now.
7 reasons why video calls are so tiring and what to do about it.
Everyone feels it — be the one to do something about it.
PostgreSQL
Getting started with PostgreSQL
How to set up PostgreSQL using docker and first steps to interacting with the database using psql and queries from sql files.
Dumping, Relationships and more
Not that kind of dump…
Richard Bell
Self taught software developer with 12 years experience excelling at JavaScript/Typescript, React, Node and AWS.
I love learning and teaching and have mentored several junior developers over my career. I find teaching is one of the best ways to solidify your own learning, so in the past few years I've been maintaining a technical blog where I write about some things that I've been learning.
I'm passionate about building a teams culture and processes to make it efficient and satisfying to work in. In many roles I have improved the quality and reliability of the code base by introducing or improving the continuous integration pipeline to include quality gates.