Open source is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever encountered in our industry. It is a movement that essentially groups people together to work on a product because they want to. They usually do it for free, especially during the first stages of the project, and then — get this — they maintain it so that others can use it. Also for free.

I tend to think that if more industries were to adopt open source as we do in software development, things would be a lot easier. Then again, that’s not why we’re here. …

The dream of being your own boss is one that almost everyone goes through at some point during their career. For some strange reason, we tend to believe we can do away with concepts such as “boss,” “9 to 5,” or “team meetings” and just sit down, put our head down, and work on what we love. Like that would solve all our problems.

In some cases, this notion becomes more than just a dream; some people actually succeed at freelance. More often than not, it either remains a dream or quickly becomes a nightmare. …

Ever heard the term rubber duck debugging? No? Well, it’s actually quite an interesting little process we have in our industry, where we speak to an inanimate object (usually a rubber duck) and by the means of the arcane, we find the solution to our current conundrum.

Well, it’s not actually that, but it’s fun to think that way.

Truth be told, the rubber duck is nothing more than a psychological trick we use — whether we’re aware of it or not, that’s a whole different thing. But it works, it really does, and scientists and researchers have been studying…

Ever heard the phrase “a developer always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street”? That means we’ve been burned so bad by mistakes — both ours and from others — that we don’t trust any situation, no matter how simple it looks.

We’ve all been there, right at the start of our career we think we know everything, and we can’t even realize that we don’t know what we don’t know.

It’s a common pattern and most junior developers go through it. …

Is it the size of the community around that person? Or maybe the number of open source projects they created? I personally think a successful developer has traits that affect several areas:

• Relationship with peers — Other developers need to trust you implicitly to be considered “successful.” And I don’t mean devs who don’t know you but rather people working with you. Those who see you every day, know what you can do, and trust that you’re always up for the challenge.
• Technically sound — You definitely know your stuff if you’re a successful developer. While you might not be…

CoffeeScript, TypeScript, PureScript and now we also have ReScript. Granted, it’s not “new new”, but it’s recent and it’s trying to take the place of the good old, and Microsoft-backed, TypeScript.

So what do you think? Do we need yet another JavaScript alternative? Should we stop playing around with these languages and start using JS accepting its flaws and defects? Aren’t we tired of alternatives popping up every year?

Welp, apparently no, we aren’t.

What’s the deal with ReScript?

Really, what makes it different from all alternatives?

Like many of them, it’s an opinionated version of what JavaScript with a strongly typed system should look…

A contract between a back-end service and a front-end consumer (or client) is usually everything there is to join both worlds. That contract can take the form of a REST API specification, a GraphQL endpoint, or anything really, as long as it tells both parties what to expect from the other.

This, however, is a love story between a Node.js back-end and a React front-end. Living in seemingly different worlds they found a common language to communicate with each other, but that wasn’t enough, misunderstandings were still happening, sometimes one would expect the other to say something that the latter…

In the world of JavaScript (and thus, TypeScript), the Composite pattern is one that you’ve probably been using without even realizing. After all, the DOM can be considered as a tree-like structure filled with entities sharing the same interface. And if we move up a level of abstraction into React or Vue, you also have a tree-like structure filled with entities called “components” sharing a common API.

Don’t you think it’s important then to understand this pattern that’s so used across multiple instances? Let’s dive right in.

The composite pattern explained

This pattern is one of the simplest ones since there is really one…