Note: This article is a written companion to the following video about functions from my brand new barely functional dev channel. My programming career has taken several turns; however, none of them have been as abrupt or consequential as my recent love affair with functional programming. I already wrote my very first post about one chapter in that journey. Before that, I was captivated by the allure of what functional programming had to offer, but I didn’t fully commit to using th...

creativity strikes Anyone who lived through the early days of web development can remember the feeling. Inspiration strikes with a brilliant new idea for creating a website, and you hurry over to the keyboard. Quickly you create a new HTML file, type in your markup, open the file in your browser of choice, and forget about Internet Explorer for a few precious minutes. In this long-since gone world, the learning curve was primarily understanding the nuances of different browser APIs - the tools...

I was never a great salesman, and Henry was in no buying mood. Shouldn’t a great product sell itself? The glare from Henry reminded me that no, they don’t. He continued the interrogation: “Who would ever pay that kind of money for some software my engineers could write themselves?” “Included in the price is our integration with your existing system. We take that risk and free up your engineers to deliver business value for your customers.” “Sounds like you pay your engineers way too much,”...

Node.js is a concurrent connection marvel. I/O bound tasks can easily scale into the tens of thousands. This software is uniquely qualified for writing highly scalable microservices that can handle serious loads. The only piece missing is an API anyone wants to use. The full gory details are available in the Node.js docs, but here’s a small incomplete taste of the fun you can expect when writing file servers in vanilla Node.js: const http = require("http"); const fs = require("fs"); const path...

Note: This focuses on my expertise within the software engineering realm, but the concepts apply equally to problems in any industry. If you happen to be in a different field, this introduction shows you how well your thought process will work in software. Great problem solvers are made, not born. Like diamonds - they are formed over many years - full of pressure and stress. Whether they consciously realize it or not, they are refining a process for efficiently solving problems. I will expl...