So...I just made the switch to an M1 MacBook Air. Like many others. And it's been about 6 years since I last personally used a Mac. So, I started my reintroduction to Mac OS and getting acquainted with my shiny new laptop. However, I've never needed to configure any terminal application. The default functionality has always been enough to get my work done. Trying to use Node.js on M1--and running into a need for zsh--has changed that for me.
Much of the modern internet is impacted by one programming language—and it provides a level of interactivity and finesse that used to not exist—yes, Javascript.
Almost two years ago, I posted a video covering a niche use-case of running a React and Express development environment from a single command. The video turned out to be the most successful video of my new YouTube channel, and still continues to push things forward. Considering the previous video automated React & Express (and a touch of Node.js) behind a single command, the next step would seem to be...to add Mongo DB to the mix.
As I move further along in my career, I'm finding more instances where I wished I could've looked to others for simple answers on things. Whether it be: advice on skills to focus on, how to start working on something, or what "progress" looks like.
When I started working as a software engineer, documentation was the first major problem that jumped out at me. Or rather, the lack of it. Further, most of the team docs hadn't been updated in several years--decades for some of it. So docs were outdated for new hires, and forgotten by people who had memorized the chunks they needed. The rest was delegated to tribal knowledge.
The last post I wrote on refactoring this blog for subdirectories made an assumption I didn't realize was such a weak point, for generating article routes, based on crawling directories. When deploying after finishing the code for supporting directories, the deployment builds started failing, and the main error reported was confusing.
A few months ago I converted this blog over to Next.js (file-based routing, big win!) but this also meant that to get the /[year]/blog-post-title URL structure I needed to support subdirectories in the build process. So, considering it originally only supported files in a single flat directory, a refactor was in order.