Dominic Finn

Was playing around with the #Zed IDE from Zed Industries this evening. There's no Windows installer for it yet but you can compile it pretty easily. Yesterday I updated my #Rust toolchain, and with Visual Studio Community made sure the MSVC C++ build tools and Windows 11 SDK were installed. I let `cargo run` do its thing while I did other stuff, and when it eventually finished, it just launched without any build errors. Love that. Still early days though, it's not yet the most intuitive to use. I do like the docs as they are now, and also the familiar keybindings from VS Code. I wonder how easy a complete newcomer would find it though. The idea of built in #collaboration features for the IDE is great. I first saw this kind of feature many years ago in JetBrains #IntelliJ IDEA, where you could do things like viewing a colleague's session and diffing files against their local copy. I thought that was amazing! We've also seen it in recent years in Visual Studio Code and VS proper with #LiveShare. One thing these kinds of tools have issues with usually though is challenges within corporations - networking policies, proxies and firewalls, data privacy policies, etc. Having an ability to use an on-premise/local server for this would be nice too I think. As far as I understand, you can run a local collaboration version, but it's just a dev tool at the moment more than a product. The ability to follow collaborators is useful for #remotePairing or #mobProgramming. Channels with a side-by-side chat window, and note links to Markdown notes is nice. I haven't really used all the features fully, but I think it might support voice? Since COVID days I've wanted a way to combine something like Discord with Live Share or MS Teams, where you can enter a "room" with your colleagues/team, similar to being in an open office while working on-site, but now working remotely. Need a break, go over into the "coffee corner" virtual room and see what people in there are chatting or talking about - whether its collaborating on something, or just socializing. Need to have a quick team breakaway discussion, use another room/channel. Having AI as another "collaborator" in the IDE is of course nice. Interesting to see the support of multiple language model integrations too. I've recently been wanting to get back into the command line world as a primary environment, and like that it has built in vim emulation (yes... I'm finally wanting to figure out how to be a vim power user... maybe). Glad to see there's a #csharp extension, as well as an #asciidoc extension, think I might be testing those pretty soon :) Looking forward to not just playing around a bit, but trying it out on a proper project, to see how it performs. zed.dev https://lnkd.in/e5Shjx8P

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There’s a fascinating ‘leaked’ PDF[1] doing the rounds at the moment. It, allegedly, was penned by Mr Beast, and in it, he outlines key factors for success at his production company. I’d recommend reading it as he speaks with great candour, and it’s packed with broadly applicable insights, but my personal favourite is this: === USE CONSULTANTS Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world’s largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake lol. He’s already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. === Whenever I’ve mentored people who wanted to start out in consultancy, I’ve always said the same thing: a consultant is just someone who’s done something at least once more than their client. Consultants aren’t there to be smarter than their clients—they’re there because they’ve BEEN dumber. Consultants have already seen and made all of the right mistakes in all of the right permutations, and they’re there to stop their clients from doing the same. Your client CAN DO what you do—you’re not special. It’s just going to take them longer. You’re not hired because you know what to do—it’s because you also know what not to do. You’re not special; you’re a shortcut. 1. https://lnkd.in/eD6SYchZ

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I thought it might be fun to start a bit of a LinkedIn Challenge - to meet 100 Developers in 100 Days I've been a C#/.NET software developer for over 2 decades. I've actually been coding with the .NET Framework since one of its beta releases Post a comment of what your primary coding language is and how long you've been mastering your craft #softwaredevelopers #coders #100devsin100days #linkedinchallenge

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More projects are moving away from complicated build processes for their front-end assets and back to something simpler. https://lnkd.in/eHVrSWcE #dev #SoftwareDevelopment #FrontEnd #css

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MVPs shouldn't go to the bin, unless the business pivots to something else. Way too often I've seen agencies & devs building MVPs in a 'poor' way (and that's a nice way of putting it), because 'who cares, it will go to the bin anyway when you get PMF and fundraise'. I disagree. There's absolutely NO reason that your MVP should go to the bin, unless your business model or product change dramatically. And even then, a lot of boilerplate (like signup, subscriptions management, emails, etc) - can and should stay the same. If done right, that should be a given, with 0 extra effort on the dev side. If someone's quoting you to do a poor job, don't work with them. You can stay agile & lean (as a startup should) without compromising on quality, and forcing yourself to rewrite the next version of your app. When you're investing in something, especially at an early stage when money is tight, it's important to NOT buy garbage.

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React 19 was originally anticipated to be released back in May during 2024 React Conf but we're now heading in July and there is still no release date in sight. The initial feedback on React 19's new features was rather positive, new hooks, no longer having to worry about memoization, etc. As developers started using the release candidate more they encountered massive performance issues when using suspense boundaries. If sibling nodes under a suspense boundary previously triggered asynchronous data fetches, those operations would execute in parallel. Under React 19 that has changed, they are now executing sequentially. The React team's response can be summed up as "you're doing it wrong, this new way is better", which if you rewrite your code it could be but this is a rather large change that will negatively impact applications that utilize suspense and don't rewrite. If you want to go in depth into the drama behind React 19's release there's an excellent blog that you can check out https://lnkd.in/gvZHbQXd

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🚨 JavaScript Contractor Pay Rates 🚨 Over the last 2 weeks I've spoken to 80+ JavaScript Engineers, who are all contractors, and are all highly skilled and experienced with React. They have other skills of course, but their core skill is React/Typescript. Below is a scatter graph of what they are getting paid right now in a contract role. I did this a couple of years ago and I remember there was a huge variety of rates regardless of experience, what I can see from below is that rates have stabilised massively, and people are now getting paid pretty consistently dependant on their level. It's good to see the market has stabilised and that people are getting paid what they are worth. If you feel you are getting paid below market rates, reach out and we can see what other opportunities I have for you. Or if you are looking to ramp up contingent staff quickly, and need to know what you should be paying, reach out. #JavaScript #TypeScript #React #Contractors #Sydney

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Bad Comments ❌ Too many comments are almost worse than no comments. They inflate the code and typically overwhelm the person working on it. Some examples of what a bad comment is... Nonlocal Info - Commenting about a bit of code that the comment is not near. Commented out code - This often remains in the software for no real reason and nobody dares to delete it because somebody at some point thought it might be needed. It bloats the code and is 'probably' never going to be used. Redundant or Misleading Comments - Usually done with a good intention at the time but the control might have changed over time and the comment is no longer serving its original purpose. . .delete them. There are many more to be honest, but these are some of the most common. I have added a link below in comments to a video showing some of the actual comments on the Simpsons Hit and Run game for the PlayStation - Hilarious this even went on at that level 😂 😂 if you can spare 2 minutes watch it.

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What is a TypeScript Engineer? I keep seeing this pop up in recruitment posts, which means clients are asking for it...right? Has this replaced the FullStack Engineer, which, lets be honest, meant a NodeJS developer. That was back in the good old days when it was only NodeJS. Now we have Bun, Deno, Hono and more. Or perhaps its asking for a Javascript developer...whatever that means in todays world of a thousand js frameworks and evolving ES standards. Or are they actually asking for a Java developer, because someones used Gen AI along the way and it got confused between Java and Javascript (*shudders*) Are they seriously in need of a type system engineer, thats kinda niche. It's hard enough trying to explain what you do as a job to "normal" folk as it is, without this level of obfuscation. How would you even explain this when asked "What do you do?". Do kids nowadays needs to consider themselves experts in everything inside package.json to land a job? When will the industry move beyond this fixation on specific languages? I get it, it's an important consideration, but asking for Typescript Engineers...it's not going to help you find the devs you actually need.

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Working with code that you didn't write can be tricky enough as it is. With strict concurrency checking and Swift 6 right around the corner it makes sense to both: - ensure we don't run into issues when importing modules we didn't write - others don't run into issues when using modules that we wrote We can use the @preconcurrency attribute to this. Learn more about this attribute here: https://lnkd.in/eKuDXsbV

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One criticism of "strict TDD" is that you're not allowed to add tests after the code's complete. I don't recognise this version of "strict" TDD. If the tests I'm left with from TDD-ing code aren't giving me that warm, fuzzy feeling, I'll explore more, maybe write more tests (or refactor to data-driven or property-based tests if it really has to work, or grab a colleague and do guided inspections if it really, really has to work, or even a proof of correctness if it really, really, really has to work. Whatever gives me sufficient warm fuzzies, basically). As far as I'm aware, after ~25 years of doing and teaching TDD, that's allowed. Not just allowed, in fact, but recommended. 5/5 on Tripadvisor. Would go again. And likewise, if I think, going forward, I don't need some of these regression tests, I'll remove them or consolidate etc. The tests that drive our design often correspond to good regression tests, but certainly not always. More work usually needs to be done. Once the design's in place from TDD-ing the code, we're in the realms of something called "testing", where tests we add are expected to pass first time (though they might not, and that's a good reason to do it). Oh, and this is probably a good time to mention mutation testing. I'll routinely mutation test new or changed code and if that throws up gaps in my regression tests, I'll fill them.

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Frontend Developers, thoughts on Svelte? How does it compare to React? Is this a trend or can you see it becoming a leading JS framework? Keen to hear your thoughts. #Svelte #React #Frontend #technologies #javascript

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🤔 Ever wondered how you can better illustrate complex multi-party processes without having to reach for the usual diagramming tools?! 🧜 Checkout Mermaid markdown as an amazing tool for creating dozens of different diagrams/processes without needing anything more than a modern Markdown parser Works in the likes of: ✅ Github ✅ Notion ✅ Sites with Markdown editors ⏩ Never struggle to explain processes without the aid of illustrations simply within a Markdown editor 🔗 Notion page example in comments

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The 2024 StackOverflow survey is out, and for the 8th year in a row, Clojure has ranked near the podium in the Top Paying Technologies category—often occupying rank 1. I don't talk much about why I choose to use a weird Lisp—mostly because nobody cares—but the results speak for themselves. If you can hold your nose long enough to learn something very different, you'll find yourself in a high-productivity environment that features: 🔥 Hot code reloading 🦆 Dynamic typing ♻️ Best-in-class garbage collection 📂 Highly performant immutable data structures 📚 Access to the entire JVM's ecosystem of libraries 🧩 Cross-platform compilation to JavaScript 🧠 An unbelievably smart and humble community Sure, you'll pay a high mental price to learn the language, but as a reward, employers will pay a high price for *you*.

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Do you have a React Native app and want to extend your app into the land of Vision OS? Well look no further than this wonderful little package https://lnkd.in/eGrjCe2K (I have no affiliation). It definitely isn't ready for production use but it's a great step forward in bridging the gap and bringing React Native and VisionOS closer together. I will try it out and share some findings... I feel like I have to because I am doing literally nothing else with my Vision Pro. #ReactNative #VisionOS #Development

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Sometimes when we think about technical debt, the immediate reaction is to want to stamp it out. Fix things, upgrade everything, refactor. Now. But sometimes you have to pause and ask: will an application gain value when we refactor it? Try flipping that question around: does a badly written app have enough value that it's worth refactoring? Maybe that's the question you need to ask.

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> signs up for a developer SDK > they require you to enable 2FA > you’ve to use an Authenticator app > now Authenticator app wants you to authenticate > change password > password can’t be something you used in past > change password again > confirm it in the email via a link > get the Authenticator code > put in the developer SDK platform > 2FA enabled Are we fine living like this?

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