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This article provides an in-depth explanation of React's useCallback hook. useCallback helps avoid unnecessary re-renders by memoizing callback functions, ensuring they are only recreated when necessary. Using code examples, the article explains memoization, a key concept behind useCallback, along with React.memo, a component used for memoizing entire React components.
In 1990, half of AT&T’s phone network went down as a result of one line of C code, leading to a buggy implementation of call handling. The outage affected over a hundred thousand Americans and the company lost $60 million. This article goes over the buggy piece of code that was deployed by AT&T and how engineers fixed it and shares resources for understanding reliability engineering in the modern development world better.
The author of this article stumbled upon a collection of old projects, including websites and graphic design, while browsing through a folder. These projects lacked structure and often crucial data, prompting the author to devise a new archiving strategy. The strategy involved leaving projects up online that don't require maintenance, occasionally migrating them to different domains, and archiving them with screenshots, READMEs, database backups, and generated assets for future reference.
Effective communication and framing are important soft skills for software engineers. Framing things in a positive manner is useful when discussing promotions with a manager, sharing stories in interviews, giving feedback to coworkers, and various other situations. This article introduces a framework for framing messages effectively that involves considering who the audience is, what you want to achieve, what they care about, and how to explain your message in terms they understand.
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Sad Servers is a website that provides debugging challenges for engineers.
draw-a-ui uses tldraw and the GPT-4 Vision API to generate HTML from a drawn wireframe. It takes a PNG image and processes that image using GPT-4 to create an HTML file with Tailwind CSS.
This article discusses the importance of understanding HTTP status codes and reading API documentation. The author encountered an error triggered by a typo in a Twitch API call. Surprisingly, the API returned an HTTP 200 status code (indicating success) for a non-existent user, which should logically have resulted in a 404 (not found) error. This incident highlighted the need for correct HTTP status codes in API responses and the importance of defensive coding.
Commit messages play a significant role in the future of open source projects. A good commit message should clearly state the type of change, summarize the change, and optionally include a detailed description. Using an example, this article demonstrates how to transform a vague commit message into one that is informative and useful to maintainers, following the steps of specifying the commit type, summarizing the change, and adding an optional detailed description.
A set of principles for web development that leverages the simplicity of HTML’s attribute syntax.
A list of useful, not-obvious hacks to get the most out of your browser’s debugger.
Useful VSCode extensions, such as HTML and CSS autocompletion.