Blog

  • React Developer’s Crash Course into Elm

    React Developer’s Crash Course into Elm

    Learning Functional Programming has a high learning curve. However, if you have something familiar to base it off of, it helps a lot. If you know React & Redux, this gives you a huge head start. Below, we’ll cover the basics of Elm using React & Redux/Context as a basis to help make it easier to learn.

    The below deviates a bit from the Elm guide, both in recommendations and in attitude. Elm development philosophy is about mathematical correctness, learning & comprehending the fundamentals, and keeping things as brutally simple as possible. I’m impatient, don’t mind trying and failing things 3 times to learn, and immersing myself in complexity to learn why people call it complex and don’t like it. I’m also more about getting things done quickly, so some of the build recommendations follow more familiar toolchains React, Angular, and Vue developers are used too which is pretty anti-elm simplicity.

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  • AWS Lambda Function Design Best Practice

    When designing AWS Lambda’s, try to keep the side effects low. Think of your handler function having just 1 IO type. Just like a list can be typed as Array[string], try keeping just one IO type as well.

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  • Learning AWS in 2020: Pick something Fun, Do Your Best, Forget the Rest.

    Had mid-year performance reviews at work recently and it reminded me how, yet again, what I specialize in has changed in the past 4 years, specifically in Cloud Engineering in AWS. At work you fill out what you want to accomplish in the next 6 months personal growth & career wise. Your manager reviews & confirms/denies/suggests differences. You accept/reject/suggest changes, until you both agree on a path forward. Think like a video game skill tree and you pick a few branches and boxes you want to work towards.

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  • Who Says Distributed Monoliths are Bad?

    I’m going down the rabbit hole of reading about microservices for an upcoming talk. As a UI guy, I’m always playing catchup, more so on the back-end. I’m intentionally targeting my survival bias trying to find _anything_ that cites Distributed Monoliths as good (most assume bad). This was originally posted on Twitter.

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