We’ve all been there: you’re given an app to maintain. The app has abysmal testing stats, with almost no testing coverage. Maintenance and extension is a major pain with no real way to tell if you’ve broken anything.

This is an incredibly hard situation: the engineer before you decided that they didn’t need unit tests and that they were sent by the heavens to be the only engineer that writes flawless code the first time.

The application I inherited had 0 unit tests. It was a Flutter & Typescript frontend and backend, respectively. …

At companies at a fraction of Amazon’s scale, internal tools are a must. Projects get large and hard to maintain if everyone is doing things in different ways, or if you’re putting all of your weight on, say, Github Actions.

So while there was a plethora of tools inside Amazon that developers use, there’s one tool that almost all Amazon employees work with and is a gift to programmers… and it’s not internal. That’s right: It’s a beautiful external tool that anyone can use.

While this article reads like a long advertisement, I’m in no way speaking on behalf of…

I’m near the wrapping up point of my two-month long summer internship at the Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. I’m lucky to have been able to spend my summer getting an inside look at the culture and work-life of one of the largest companies on the planet — here’s what I learned in my two months.

NOTE: While this article is about my time at Amazon, it does not reflect the ideas or attitude of my employer. …

Time to market is crucial for MVP’s: If it takes you more than a month to build (40hr work weeks), it’s no longer an MVP, it’s a product. Sometimes, it’s worth spending an hour early to save ten later.

If there’s something you’d like to change / add, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. I’m always looking to learn.

Here’s 3 tools I use to make my development speedy.

1. Postman

(I know this section is a glowing review of Postman — I am not sponsored, nor is this post. I just think that it’s an awesome tool.)

Postman is ubiquitous…

When I write code, I’m not writing it to get the job done, and I’m not writing it for myself. I’m writing it for the next person who reads or writes it.

Writing code that compiles isn’t difficult for most people who writes code professionally, and similarly, writing bugs isn’t difficult. The former is how it should be, but we should strive to limit the ability of future developers to write bugs.

This is why, when I write code, I strive for compile-time safety: I want your IDE to tell you “this won’t work” before your tests do — or…

Not all data is created equally — and not all data should be stored the same way. Similar to learning about HashMaps, Linked Lists, Heaps, etc., it’s important to know the different ways to store data in your Flutter App to create the best user experience possible.

For instance, what happens when you don’t need to deserialize a whole object — just a single field or value? It doesn’t make sense grabbing a whole config.json from memory when all you need is a single boolean field, like isDarkMode=false. …

Some Flutter packages are must-includes in each flutter project I create, because they make development so much easier.

Whether it be because they make local data storage easy, or allow you to completely replace parts of your app with a single package, there are some packages that I automatically include in my Flutter projects before I even start coding.

If you’re working on an app and want to release your app quickly, you’re going to want to know about these Flutter packages.

If there are any packages that are must-includes for you, leave a comment and let me know —…

Typescript is an amazing language — one that allows us to do everything JavaScript can in a tenth of the debugging time. These tips will mostly be for:

• reducing bugs, by writing more explicit and understandable code
• pack more value into your code without reinventing the wheel.

If you already know these, then congrats! You’re a TS Legend — maybe share some of your wisdom with me in the comments (and read my other article with 5 seperate tips!).

Here’s 5 advanced TypeScript tips that will allow you to write better TypeScript Code.

1. The “is” operator / Type Guards

Swagger is really, really helpful to see…