Articles

I came across Superstruct from the React Hook Form documentation - in particular the schema-based form validation. Since I wasn't thrilled about burying form field validation logic inside JSX, I choose to use Superstruct. In this short post, I'll walk through an example of how to use Superstruct for simple to slightly more complex data validation.

For good measure, I periodically review fundamental programming concepts - in particular, algorithms and data structures. In this article, I'd like to walk through my design and implementation of a generic tree data structure.

All my projects thus far favor NoSQL document databases such as MongoDB or Firebase's Cloud Firestore. To brush up on my backend developer skills, I thought it time to dive into SQL and relational databases. In this article, I'll cover a simple setup to manually issue SQL commands against a MySQL database running inside a Docker container.

Yesterday, I released the latest version of Memowise - now a complete CRUD application with GitHub authentication. Over the last two weeks its size and complexity grew large enough for me to experience pain points in my development process. This article covers what I did right and what I can improve on the next project.

I built my website using Gatsby and it used the gatsby-transformer-remark plugin to extract excerpts from Markdown files. After migrating the website to use MDX, I lost the built-in excerpt functionality. This articles covers my work-around.

On a recent project, I decided to give lint-staged a try. For those who don't know, it's a tool that runs linters against staged git files, thus preventing poor code from slipping into the project code base. As I followed two example projects using lint-staged, here and here, I began to stumble down yet another rabbit hole of tooling pain.

Today, modern web applications use some flavor of the MVC pattern with the aid of a client-side framework. Having missed the pre-frontend framework era, I asked myself if I really understood this foundational pattern? To answer this question, I decided to build an app that adhered to the basic premise of MVC. This article discusses key points of my implementation.

A recent job posting led me to travelsalem.com. The website design is arguably dated and navigation proved to be cumbersome using the complex menu system. Then I ran into bugs.

It didn't take long to realize the site needed a modern design. As a personal challenge, I built a one-page demo to address the issues I experienced and perhaps sparks ideas about how best to improve the website's utility. This article explains my design decisions.

For years I've had a reserved spot on the internet - my own domain. I built my first blog using Jekyll and Sass. Then I redesigned the site, again and again. And yet I never published one article. This is my new website - built using Gatsby and Tailwind CSS, and it's the first site I'll actually use. Here's why.