/blog

I’ve met tons of developers who would not do error handling because of fear of it being too much. Here’s a short list of reasons: We’re going to write too much boilerplate because the properties are too deeply nested. The code will look ugly. Why write a ton of if statements? The server always returns that response, why bother? Why validate this input — it’s declared as type="number" in the DOM so it only takes numbers.

We’re so imbued in zero-to-hero stories we fail to see the years of struggle, the lucky breaks and the sheer amount of effort today’s successful entrepreneurs had to put in to get to where they are. If you’re an avid reader like myself, you’re not getting any help there, either. The whole self-help genre is cluttered with overnight successes and “You can do it, Johnny!” attitudes. They’re lying to you! You end up believing that you simply have to push hard to get somewhere.

It’s 2014 All my colleagues are writing their Bachelor’s Degree paper in LaTeX1. Or MSWord… 🤮 I’m doing it in Markdown, mostly because LaTeX looks too verbose for me. And I’m not that smart anyway. I was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier, to begin with. So, back to LaTeX: too verbose, too many keywords. Looks like the type of thing highly skilled academics use to flex their look-at-how-many-format-specifiers-I-can-pull-from-memory muscles.

I signed up to Y Combinator Startup School with WeRemote. I’m putting in weekly status reports, watch some of the lectures, and I only missed a single session so far. During each session I have to talk about the platform and describe it. __It’s like an investor pitch. __ What’s funny is that neither myself, nor a many of the founders I talk to manage to keep the presentation short and concise.

🛑 Stop asking for a price You are not buying potatoes at the farmers market! Think about it as if you were buying a pair of custom designer shoes. You may ask, and get a starting price, but that’s it. The rest depends on the model, materials required, adjustments made to the shoes to fit you, the deadline, as well as the number of orders the designer already has & can take.

Getting feedback from your target audience early on in product development is pure gold! This helps you make reusable components that allow you to iterate, build and test out new ideas a lot faster. This is what I did with weremote.ro and all that feedback and community involvement helped me create a non-intrusive UI/UX that I can reuse on weremote.eu, which is coming soon. It’s what enabled me to create the landing page for weremote.

I’ve been working on migrating my the remote jobs platform I built in the past months from weremote.ro to weremote.eu. The platform’s backend is a GraphQL API built over Express.js which runs inside a Docker container. I was initially building the image myself, whenever I pushed some changes worth deploying to production, but I very quickly switched to GitHub Actions once I learned about this feature. With this migration to .

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — (attributed to) Mark Twain I’ve met people, both online and IRL, who believe that if they’re schooled they must also be educated. People who believe that the educational funnel they went through must have made them better than the rest. Although the last statement might be true, in some regards, they tend to extend its meaning to being better than others with a number of years of practical experience equivalent to their years of study.

I’ve been thinking about an answer to this question since I started migrating everything from www.weremote.ro to www.weremote.eu. I thought long and hard about an answer, since all the effort I’m putting into this remote jobs platform is personal, self-funded and self-everything-else. I finally found it, today: I want to reach the level of financial freedom that would allow me to use my phone without a protective case. Now I’m going to pass it on to you:

I’ve been developing single-page web-apps for a while now, and it’s gotten into my habit to use LocalStorage to store JWTs. The reason I used JWT was to embed data about the user, and keep it on the client-side, to authenticate (identify) requests/users. Figured out a while ago that it was wrong. On many levels! TL;DR — don’t use JWT and don’t store sensitive data in LocalStorage For starters, it’s not okay to store auth data in LocalStorage.