PinnedUnder-the-hood of GitFor many years now Git has been the SCM (source control management aka version control) of choice. It offered many features which alternatives such as CVS did not, and combined with GitHub website created an entire CI pipeline which any teams Dev practices could be built around. When I began…Git11 min read
PinnedUnder-the-hood of GraphQLIn recent years GraphQL has really taken off as a pattern/library/type system. It offers much which REST does not and its standardisation and flexibily has really helped in its adoption. When I began looking for a detailed explanation of how graphql works internally I struggled to find anything which was…Java Script13 min read
Aug 16, 20204 techniques to improve as a software devI spent many years struggling to improve as an engineer. …Software Development4 min read
Jul 2, 2020Under-the-hood of VSCode auto formatters (e.g Prettier)VSCode has become a staple for many developers local environment. One of the reasons is the powerful extensions which can be run from within the IDE itself, from type checking to code auto formatting. Here we will take a look at an overview of VSCode and then dig into how…Programming7 min read
Jun 8, 2020Under-the-hood of test runners (e.g. Mocha)Test runners are a very important part to the modern JavaScript application. Without which we could not be able to run any tests at all. They are fairly straight forward to understand in terms of what they do, they run your tests and print output. …Nodejs8 min read
May 7, 2020Under-the-hood of type systems (e.g. TypeScript)I struggled to find an explanation from a low-level view of exactly how a “JavaScript type system compiler” is implemented. I understood many of the jobs of a type system but was unsure of the mechanisms involved and how they worked together. This article will aim to shine a light…Nodejs12 min read
Published in ITNEXT·Apr 24, 2020Source Maps from top to bottomThis article covers a basic overview and an in-depth explanation of the mechanics of JS code generators and source maps. Building our own from scratch, hence why it is quite long. Source Maps are something of a mystery to most people. They are found in most web-based compilation scenarios; from…Java Script15 min read
Published in ITNEXT·Apr 15, 2020Under-the-hood of React HooksReact is filled with interesting design patterns, when Hooks were introduced it cleaned up many of the issues people had with the more arguably frustrating features such as classes and lifecycle methods. …Java Script7 min read
Apr 12, 2020Using ‘delivery metrics’ to review team best practicesAt Nested there are a series of best practices which are followed for a given project’s delivery. Today we will look at those practices, and how to use some “delivery metrics” to understand if they are being followed. The values had been built up over time through many project successes…Delivery Software5 min read
Published in ITNEXT·Apr 9, 2020Under-the-hood of web bundlers (e.g. Webpack)Webpack is somewhat of a black box for most developers. Tools like “create-react-app” abstract most of the bundler functionality away. I did some research into it and began building my own light-weight web bundler to understand more about what it entails. This is part of my “under-the-hood of” series: Type…Java Script7 min read
