I’ve been in the software industry for more than five years now and have already worked with more technologies, languages and tools than I could’ve ever imagined. Over these five years, I’ve slowly grown to be a good software engineer and have learnt a few things along this journey. This article consists of tips to help you on your journey to becoming a good software engineer. Let’s dive right in.

Learning to learn

If there’s one thing that’s constant in the IT world, it is that technologies keep changing. Every few years, you might hear of the next big thing that you need…

Introduction

I’ve been fascinated with GitHub Actions as I really like the idea of having the build and deployment configuration closely knit with the repository itself. I also like the use of YAML to define the entire workflow. I recently covered how to deploy an app to GitHub Pages itself, but then I thought to myself how would I deploy an app externally, let’s say to an Azure storage account, for example? This article aims at answering this question.

At a high level, we’ll cover the following in this article:

1. The starting point: We’ll create a sample React app and push…

Introduction

If you’re learning TeamCity (like me), you might find the free trial period too short to experiment with to your heart's content. Luckily, the folks at JetBrains have a solution for you — host TeamCity yourself. Even better is the fact that the installation is not dreadful at all, as you might’ve imagined. I’ve recently set it up on my personal device and this article aims at walking you through this process.

Setting up a TeamCity server

We’ll be setting up a TeamCity server locally using Docker. So, first, let’s go ahead and install Docker. …

“What a bright sunny day it is,” James woke up to the sound of birds chirping. He looked over to the other side of the bed and found that his wife, Emma, had already made an early start.

What followed after that was his usual morning routine. James started his day by making notes in his gratitude journal, followed by a shower and then a bite to eat along with a hot cup of coffee downstairs in the kitchen. On the other hand, Emma liked to run around the block for a bit before coming back home for a cold…

Introduction

I originally came across this StackOverflow question and it got me thinking — how would I automatically inject the CSS contents of a CSS file into an HTML page? After some research, I found a solution and this article aims at walking you through it.

Problem

Let’s revisit the problem before we dive into the solution. We want to replace the link tag in the HTML file with the CSS contents of the file that the link tag refers to. So, for instance, if the HTML contained the following line of code:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">

It should be replaced with this:

…

Introduction

Netlify Functions are Netlify’s version of serverless functions — a single-purpose script deployed to a managed hosting provider, in this case, Netlify, that scales on-demand. Bolt JS is a framework to build Slack apps using JavaScript. I was curious about combining these two together, and with no guidance on how to do so, I ended up researching this subject quite a bit and eventually, figuring it out. This how-to guide aims at explaining how to create a TypeScript-based Slack app using Bolt JS and run it as a serverless function using Netlify Functions.

I understand that this a lengthy how-to…

The road to self-publishing can be overwhelming especially when there are so many different aspects to look at. One major chunk of work involves formatting your manuscript so that it’s readable on different devices. Not knowing where to start or how to join all the dots can be frustrating, so to make your life easier, I’ve put together a simple guide that explains this process and I also provide some insight based on the experience of going through this process myself.

Preface

This guide is catered toward formatting your eBook only. For paperback options, different steps might be involved. This guide…

An easy-to-digest four-part article to help you get started with Sass

Introduction

Broken down into four easy-to-digest parts, this article aims at getting your feet wet with Sass. Once you’re comfortable with how everything fits together, you can move onto more complex concepts. To aid our learning process and compile Sass files, we’ll be using Scout-App.