No library needed, just a ~120-line component. — Open Source Library vs. Do it Yourself Often we like to just reach for an open source library to accomplish a ‘simple enough functionality’. This is an enticing pattern in software engineering at first glance, but beneath the hood of something like the rapidly changing and evolving React Native ecosystem, there are often many problems with compatibility…

The last tool you will ever need to manage third-party code. — Today’s the day I release Kurynt! I’m excited, but I’m also feeling sketched out; Kurynt is way more complex than my first successful SaaS product, The Wheel Screener. Additionally, I’ve built Kurynt only in my free time in between massive engineering work at InClub. I was able to build The…

From Frontend to Backend: Using gRPC (Bonus: How to Use gRPC with React Hooks!) — This post is mirrored on my blog, chrisfrew.in Go, gRPC, Microservices?! Oh, My! As the CTO at InClub, a good amount of my time is learning about and planning to scale out our sort of 'seed stage' architecture (monolithic, managed servers, C# API) to a more 'Series A' and beyond architecture (for us, this means…

Insights from startup land! — This post is mirrored on my blog, chrisfrew.in Today Marks My 1 Year Anniversary at InClub! So, today (June 8th, 2022) marks one year anniversary of my first commitment to the InClub codebase:

Back to the basics with this pattern. — Disclaimer: This post was written with frontend projects in mind, like websites, React Native mobile apps, and Electron apps. Though there are some transferrable skills to backend programming, as I mention further down. Also, the title is a bit of a joke. …

If you’ve recovered from COVID at any time in the European Union in some member states, it will be at best extremely confusing and at worst impossible for you to be able to travel to the United States. — This post is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual software posts. In a way, however, the ultimate message relates heavily to software engineering in that it is all based on logic, and in this case, the logic fails. Before you roll your eyes at the…

An elegant solution to a common problem — Straight to the Code There’s an example repository scaffolded with create-react-app which I've created for this post. Probably of most interest is the component FancyTitle which uses the default props pattern discussed in this blog post. Now let’s get into the details of the pattern. Optional Props Pattern When using TypeScript with React, it’s easy enough to…

Don’t overlook them! Don’t think they are too advanced for you! — Back to the Basics I thought my guides on neat generic TypeScript functions would be loved around the software world. Posts like my Generic Search, Sort, and Filter, or my Generic Function to Merge Object Arrays, or my Generic Function to Update and Manipulate Object Arrays, all in TypeScript, all generic, and (I thought!)…

Letter-level alternating colors for bash and zsh shells. — Colored Shell Prompts?! With Emojis?! Most of us devs know we can color our shell prompts with various colors, and in shell syntax it is some sort of ugly looking formatting string like \e[31m - that one is for the color red, by the way - I'm sure you recognized it immediately. 😂 I took…