It’s no secret that I love GraphQL. I first encountered it when transitioning this site to Gatsby at the start of the year. Gatsby incorporates GraphQL into their data layer and exposes multiple plugins to incorporate data sources. When I started exploring GraphQL in more detail, the number of resources and their detail was substantially less. I won’t even go into how long I spent trying to find information on testing strategies. One of my personal missions has been to help break down barriers to learning GraphQL amongst people in my circles. It is substantially less intimidating to get started than first glance may appear, and the reference material has increased. I have given several talks on the topic, breaking down the core concepts…

The democratization of learning in software development continues to be one of my favorite things. Coupled with meetups and communities which allow for people to learn from others results in a great learning environment. There were several people who strongly invested in me as I was first learning to code; they answered what I felt were silly questions, reviewed my code, and encouraged me to continue pushing forward. This aspect of the community was essential to my learning experience and becoming the developer that I am today. Previously, I considered mentoring something that was primarily relegated to senior developers; the additional experience and leadership roles make this a logical conclusion. Until recently, this resulted in my…

Fear of speaking and feelings of an inadequate technical knowledge base can often be a paralytic combination, especially to those newer to a technical field. Imposter syndrome and feelings of inaptitude can easily become dominant, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy with high levels of inertia. Thankfully, I have a low level of unease regarding speaking in front of people, including to groups upward of 60 people. While my presentation experience has largely not been about technical topics, much of the skillset translates over. As I mentally prepared myself for the idea of giving a technical talk, I still had to overcome the serious sense of imposter syndrome that I could provide anything meaningful to the conversation as a developer…

I am so excited to announce that the redesign of my portfolio and blog is finally live after going back to to the conceptual drawing board and rebuilding it from the ground up. It has been an exciting journey to implement new development and design concepts that I have picked up since May 2017 when I built the first version of the site. At the time, it was the first full site that I had put together, and was substantially more involved than the relatively small projects I had done to that point. Since then I worked on more complex applications, built a full stack travel application with a team of two other developers, and dove headfirst into React. The previous version of the site was built using Jekyll as a static site generator. This…

This was a week of pushing myself towards things that I have not utilized before, and confronting things that had previously made me nervous. I decided that I wanted to incorporate a quote slideshow in the About section which would utilize the same basic logic that I had already created for the slideshow. I am not a fan of copying code across files, and appreciate modularity when possible... Due to the carousel component using state and methods which directly alter the state I was not able to simply export the functions. After some research, it seemed like a higher order component would serve the need that I wanted and I decided to finally research them more. I’m not sure why higher order components had previously intimidated me. As I…