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Within minutes of this post going live, this laptop goes back to the company. Work is handed over....

The Linux kernel, Fedora, and LLVM now require an “Assisted-by” tag on patches created with the help...

Well, first real job and I still haven't gotten used to waking up for a 6:30 AM shift... I've been...

30 React.js Interview Questions You Should Know Before Your Next Frontend Interview ⚛️ Whether you're preparing for a frontend interview or simply want to brush up on your React.js knowledge , this guide covers 30 real-world, scenario-based React interview questions that interviewers frequently ask. The goal isn't just to memorize definitions. These questions are designed to help you understand how and when to apply React concepts in real-world applications . 📌 Bookmark this article and come back to it during your next interview preparation session. 📚 What We'll Cover In this guide, we'll explore questions around: Conditional rendering API calls and side effects Form validation Performance optimization State management Component re-rendering Keys and lists Dark mode Dynamic components useEffect vs useLayoutEffect Large-list optimization And much more... 1. How do you handle conditional rendering in React? Conditional rendering allows you to render different UI based on application state or conditions. You can use standard JavaScript techniques such as: if...else Ternary operators Logical && Example { isLoggedIn ? < Dashboard /> : < Login />} 💡 Interview Tip For simple conditions, a ternary operator or && is usually sufficient. For more complex conditions, consider moving the logic outside the JSX to keep the component readable. 2. You need to fetch API data when a component mounts. What's the best way to do it? 💡 Key Concept The typical approach is to perform the API request inside a useEffect hook when the component needs to fetch data after rendering. A common pattern is: useEffect (() => { // Fetch API data }, []); The empty dependency array indicates that the effect is intended to run after the initial render. Note: In modern React applications, the best approach can also depend on the framework or data-fetching library you're using. 3. How would you handle form validation in React? A common approach is to use controlled inputs and perform validation during even

Most people ask: What will my first job teach me? The deeper question is quieter: What does it take to become someone who can finally be trusted with real work? There is a real tension in the first job. One view says it’s just a stepping stone — gain experience, update the résumé, move on. Another says it shapes you in ways that stay long after the job itself is forgotten. Both can be true. A first job can be temporary. What you learn from it may not be. The First Mistake Imagine a young graduate starting on a Monday. By Thursday they have already made a small but visible mistake — the wrong file, a misread requirement, an assumption that turned out wrong. They sit at their desk replaying it. What will my manager think? Did I just ruin my first impression? But the office doesn’t stop. The team keeps working. The next task arrives. Slowly they realize something that rarely appears on any résumé: A mistake doesn’t end a career. You acknowledge it. Fix what you can. Learn. Then continue. That lesson can stay with someone for years. When Nobody Is Standing Behind You College gives instructions. A first job gives responsibility. At some point someone hands you a problem and expects you to figure out where to begin. You may not know the answer. You may not even know the right question yet. That is when the real transition begins. You learn when to ask for help, when to investigate alone, when to admit you don’t understand, and eventually when to decide without waiting for someone else to tell you exactly what to do. Two People, One First Job Imagine two people joining the same company on the same day. Both are capable. Both make mistakes. One treats every task as something to finish until a better opportunity appears. The other starts noticing what each task is teaching — how problems are approached, how decisions are made, how mistakes are handled. Five years later their résumés may look similar. Their instincts may not. The difference isn’t necessarily who had the bette

Struggling with burnout? Procrastination? Reaching your goals? Let me share a few methods that help...

There is a moment in every high-stakes environment when something goes completely, objectively wrong, and the only viable response is to keep working. In my case, it was a pantry clerk who walked into the dry storage room carrying a stack of boxes, clipped a fire sprinkler head, and discharged what I can only describe as an impressive quantity of initially greasy water across an active commercial kitchen. We were told to continue service. It took four hours for the sprinkler system technicians to arrive and resolve the situation. We dried our shoes afterward. I have thought about that shift many times since leaving commercial kitchens for the technology industry. Not because it was the strangest thing I witnessed. It wasn't. Not by a significant margin. However, because the response to it was so instinctively correct. Nobody called an all-hands. Nobody convened a retrospective on the water. We just kept swimming. It turns out that lesson travels extremely well. A few weeks ago I wrote about how a non-linear career isn't actually non-linear, that the industries change but the underlying questions stay remarkably consistent. I want to make that argument concrete. Here's what commercial kitchens specifically taught me about performing under pressure, and why none of it required translation when I showed up in technology. The Kitchen Never Lies I spent years in commercial kitchens before I spent years in technology. Western Culinary Institute. Private golf clubs. A Lebanese restaurant. Bulk production facilities turning out ten thousand pounds of macaroni and cheese a day, five days a week. Country clubs. A casino. Catering. Culinary competitions. The environments were different. The underlying dynamics were identical. High pressure. Constrained timelines. Mismatched team experience levels. Leadership of wildly variable quality and sobriety. Outcomes that mattered regardless of what had happened behind the scenes to produce them. Customers who neither knew nor cared abo

By the end of this page you can read a budget vs actual table without being fooled by it, and build one in Excel that does not fool anyone else. You will know the variance formula, why analysts write F and U instead of trusting plus and minus, the two ways percent variance lies, and how to say the whole table in one sentence. It is about twenty minutes. Here is what to actually do today. Open the last variance table you were sent and find its biggest percentage. Then find its biggest dollar amount. If they are different rows, and they usually are, you now know which row deserved the attention, and it is probably not the one that got it. The short version: variance is actual minus budget. On a revenue line, positive is good. On a cost line, positive is bad. So analysts label every line F for favorable or U for unfavorable, rank by dollars, and flag by percent. The sign flip is the trap people fall into first, so it gets the picture. The original carries a diagram here. In words: Two panels, each showing a pair of vertical bars rising from a shared baseline. In the left panel, labeled revenue, a shorter bar marked budget stands next to a taller bar marked actual. The extra height of the actual bar above the budget level is shaded in the accent color and marked with the letter F and a check mark, because collecting more revenue than budgeted is favorable. In the right panel, labeled cost, the bars have the same shapes: a shorter budget bar next to a taller actual bar. But here the extra height above budget is shaded in the warning color and marked with the letter U and a cross, because spending more than budgeted is unfavorable. A dashed horizontal line runs across each panel at the budget height. The two panels are geometrically identical, and only the meaning of the line decides whether the overshoot is good or bad. That is why the sign of a variance cannot be read without knowing the line type. Every number on this page is verified. The worked example is a small dep

By the end of this page you can say, out loud and in your own words, what every core operations number does. What the unit of work is. Throughput, and why a count on its own answers nothing. Cycle time, and the rule that ties it to how much work is sitting open. Backlog. Utilization, and why aiming for 100 percent makes everything slower. Error rate, rework and first pass yield. Service levels, and why the average hides the customers you are failing. That list is most of what an operations analyst job, a technical screen, and a first real dataset will ask of you. Here is what to actually do with it. Go through once end to end without stopping, just for the shape. Then come back to the retrieval sheet near the bottom, cover the right-hand column, and try to say each answer before you read it. That second pass is where the learning happens, and there is measured evidence for it further down. The short version: operations analytics is the study of how work moves through a process. Every number in it is either how much, how fast, how much is stuck, or how much was wrong. One idea decides more of your operations work than any other, so it gets the picture. Work arrives, waits, gets done, and leaves. How much is in progress and how long each item takes are two different spans over that same picture, and they are locked to each other. The original carries a diagram here. In words: A left-to-right process diagram. On the far left an arrow labelled "arriving" points into a row of three small stacked boxes labelled "waiting", representing a queue. An arrow leads from the queue into a single larger rounded box labelled "working", representing the person or machine doing the job. A final arrow leads out of that box to the right and is labelled "done". Above the queue and the working box, a bracket in a strong accent colour spans both and is labelled "in progress", showing that work in progress includes everything waiting as well as everything actively being worked on. Below, a

When this workbook is finished, you can change one number and watch the whole thing follow. Move a cut-off from 65 to 70 and every row re-bands, every fill recolors, every count updates, and the legend still matches the map. Nobody can color a cell by hand, because no cell has a color of its own. That is the whole trick, and it takes about twenty minutes to build. The example here is a security risk index across twenty sites. The same shape works for vendor scoring, lead scoring, incident triage, or any list where a number has to turn into a label and a color. The fault, and where it actually comes from You have met this file. A scored list, colored by hand, that nobody quite trusts any more. Look closely and the same faults turn up every time: Two rows score 61.4. One is amber, one is yellow. The same band is drawn in two shades, because two people picked from the palette on two different days. A row sits below the cut-off and is colored red anyway, because somebody knew that site was a problem. A score lands exactly on 65, which appears in two bands, so the answer depends on who typed it. One row has no band at all. It quietly drops out of every count. These look like five separate mistakes. They are one mistake, five times. The rule lives in the formatting instead of in a column. A color is not a value you can test. You cannot write a formula that asks "is this row the right shade of amber," so nothing checks it, and it drifts. The test: can you sort by band? If the band is only a color, you cannot sort it, count it, or filter it, and neither can anybody else. That is the tell. The chain: score, then band, then color Everything below is one idea applied three times. Each thing is derived from the thing before it, and only the first one is typed. Layer Where it lives Who decides it Sub-scores Four columns, one per category Your source data. Typed once. Composite score A formula, from the sub-scores and the weights The weights row Band A formula, from the score The

I'm building EverQuill, an AI-powered tabletop RPG platform — a game where an AI acts as your dungeon master, narrating the story and reacting to what you do. Every turn of that story is a message to a language model, and every message costs money. That cost isn't a problem you get to solve later, once you're big. It's a set of choices you make before anyone shows up, because the defaults you pick decide whether a bad day costs you a few cents or a few hundred dollars. Here are three decisions I made before I opened the alpha, and why. 1. When the tier is unclear, I reach for the stronger model This is tier-based routing : which model serves a request depends on who's asking. Better models write better stories and cost more; cheaper ones are faster and rougher. So free players get Claude Haiku (cheaper, ~$0.80 per million input tokens) and paying players get Claude Sonnet (stronger, ~$3.00 per million) — plus, because the platform is designed to route across providers, the same decision could hand a turn to a local model running through Ollama instead of a hosted one. That part is straightforward. The interesting case is the ambiguous one. My routing hands over the cheaper model only when a request is clearly free-tier; everything else — paid, alpha testers, admin, anything the system can't cleanly place as free — gets the stronger model. The instinct most people have is the reverse: default to cheap, protect the margin, don't spend money you don't have to. The reasoning: a rough, disappointing experience for someone who should have gotten a good one is a real cost — it just doesn't show up on the bill. It shows up as someone deciding the product isn't worth paying for. Meanwhile the money risk is capped elsewhere (more on that below), so biasing toward quality can't run away from me. Given a bounded downside on money and an unbounded downside on reputation, I'd rather err toward quality than toward cheap. 2. I stopped paying full price for the part that never chang

What are you working on? I hear these words in my day-to-day. And sometimes, when I hear them, there’s this little brain freeze that happens because my brain is probably trying to put into words the amount of things that have wandered through my head in the last 24 hours. 😂 So I thought, okay, let me try something. I want to take some of those wandering thoughts, explorations, things I'm trying out and things I'm learning, and put them into writing. This is going to be a series where I come and talk about what I'm working on — software engineering, product, work, people, faith, relationships, rest, and whatever else happens to be taking up space in my head at the moment. So, what am I working on? I recently started writing backend code, and there’s a bit of a backstory to that. I built this frontend commerce store years ago where people can come and shop for furniture. At the time, I used a backend-as-a-service to handle the backend side of the application. Now, I’m coming back to that same system and writing the backend myself with NestJS. I wanted to go beyond just consuming a backend and actually understand what is happening behind the scenes. The learning process is a bit stretching at the moment because I’m getting familiar with a lot of new concepts. Tiring and frustrating? Yes. But the feeling when I finally understand the reason behind something is always refreshing. That has been really rewarding lately. I'm also in the middle of launching a mobile application at my workplace, going through system design classes, figuring out how to get the best out of my engineers (AI sub-agents, by the way 😅), and occasionally imagining that dream job where you get to build products that serve millions of people and work with really brilliant minds. Also, I discovered the productivity rush that comes with using large monitors. 😂 Then there's learning how to rest while also trying to close out all the open loops in my head. Building reading habits. Figuring out what to pri

A team-lead's breakdown of 8 real React Native project architectures — what each one actually solves, where the "Domain-Driven" and "Micro-Frontend" labels get misused, and how to pick one without over-engineering an MVP. The house-building analogy When you build a house, the labor that lays the bricks gets paid well. The architect who drew the blueprint gets paid more — because the architect already accounted for the second floor you'll add next year, and made sure the foundation could take the load without anyone tearing down a wall later. React Native codebases work the same way. The folder structure you pick on day one either lets your app absorb 10 more features and 40 more engineers, or it collapses under its own weight and someone gets hired specifically to rewrite it. This is also, almost word for word, what a React Native team lead interview is probing for: "Walk me through how you'd structure a project" or "What's your folder structure and why?" Nobody wants your code in that answer — they want to hear you reason about trade-offs. So here are eight real folder structures, what each one actually solves, and two places where the common naming gets sloppy. 1. Flat Structure — for prototypes and MVPs src/ ├── App.js ├── HomeScreen.js ├── ProfileScreen.js ├── Button.js ├── Card.js └── api.js Everything in one src/ folder, no categorization. When to use it: a client demo, a hackathon build, a single-screen proof of concept — anything with a short shelf life, or code you expect a bigger team to re-architect later. Where it breaks: past 10–15 files you're scrolling through an undifferentiated pile with no signal about what belongs together. 2. Feature-Based Structure — the industry default src/ └── features/ ├── auth/ │ ├── components/ │ ├── screens/ │ └── services/ ├── profile/ │ ├── components/ │ ├── screens/ │ └── services/ └── feed/ ├── components/ ├── screens/ └── services/ This is the most common structure in production RN apps. Each product area — auth, pro

With all the hype in the past several years around AI (or more specifically GenAI), I'm not afraid to say – I'm an AI skeptic. It doesn't mean that I don't believe that some day AI may have a huge impact on human beings' lives, but at the moment, all I can see is irrational hype. In my background, I came from infra-security; I am not a developer, nor do I consider myself an AI expert. I am a cloud architect, meaning I'm looking at proposed architectures, seeing how they suit business requirements, and whether they are deployed in a secure, resilient, and perhaps cost-effective way. I don't see value in adding AI to every design, just for the sake of saying "our application now includes AI". I've been watching the industry since 2023 go nuts. Suddenly, everyone is eager to add AI capabilities, chasing some unexplained FOMO before the machines replace our jobs. I'm not against the use of AI. As a matter of fact, I've been using Grammarly for many years (since, for most of us, English is not our first language). In the past several years, I've been using chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and recently Gemini daily, asking questions about various topics and aspects of my life. From asking the bot to provide me an answer about a specific character in a favorite TV show, to "how do I resolve an alert shown on my car's dashboard," and up to "summarize this blog post for my newsletter". It's great that I can ask Gemini to create me a LinkedIn post based on an article I just read, add some emojis and hashtags, and at the end create me a cover image for the post. For a probabilistic system, this is great. I am expecting the system to be creative and produce me attractive results, sometimes even funny images. For a home consumer, this is great, but far from been ground breaking technology. I truly believe that the "big money" will come from enterprises paying a lot of money for AI-based solutions, once the industry can actually make something good from a non-deterministic s

Every time someone on your team says "we'll clean it up later," they're taking out a loan. The problem is that almost nobody checks the interest rate — until it bankrupts an entire sprint. Technical debt is the most-used and least-understood metaphor in software. Used well, the metaphor is genuinely powerful, because debt is exactly the right mental model — including the part everyone forgets: interest. Debt isn't the same as bad code First, a correction. Technical debt isn't just messy or bad code. It's a deliberate or accidental trade: you took a shortcut — skipped the abstraction, hardcoded the value, deferred the test — to move faster now, in exchange for a cost later. Sometimes that's a smart, conscious decision. Shipping today to validate an idea, knowing you'll refactor if it works, is often the right call. The debt isn't the problem; unmanaged, invisible debt is. The interest is the point Here's what the metaphor gets exactly right and most teams ignore. Debt accrues interest . Every feature you build on top of a shortcut is a little harder to build. Every bug in the messy area takes a little longer to fix. The shortcut doesn't cost you once — it taxes every future change that touches it, and that tax compounds. This is why teams mysteriously slow down over time. It rarely feels like a wall; it feels like everything gradually getting harder, estimates creeping up, small changes turning into week-long ordeals. That's compounding interest on debt nobody tracked. I've watched a system's velocity get quietly reclaimed by exactly this, and paying it down deliberately is part of how I approach building things properly . Good debt, bad debt The framework that makes this actionable: Deliberate, prudent debt: "We know the right design, but we're shipping the simple version to hit the deadline, and we'll fix it." Fine — it's a conscious, tracked trade. Accidental, reckless debt: "What's a design pattern?" — debt taken on through inexperience, invisibly, with no plan t

There is no manual for TronSoft. No API reference, no schema diagram, no forum thread explaining why a comanda refuses to close. If you want to understand it, you open the database and start pulling threads until something makes sense. That's exactly what I did — for months, on top of my actual job. The problem nobody wrote down I'm the Operations Manager at a restaurant in Itaúna, a mid-sized town in Minas Gerais, Brazil. I'm also the only person there who writes software. Not because I was hired to — because the restaurant runs on a Brazilian ERP called TronSoft, built on a Firebird database, and Firebird doesn't come with the kind of ecosystem you get around Postgres or MySQL. No Stack Overflow flood of answers. No official docs beyond a thin operator manual. Vendor support exists, but it's slow, and it doesn't scale to "I want to automate this specific internal workflow at 11pm on a Tuesday." So when I needed to automate payment reconciliation, close out comandas without touching the vendor's fragile UI, and trigger fiscal document emission (NFC-e) reliably, I didn't have a spec to follow. I had a live production database and a lot of curiosity. Learning a system by watching it think I started the way you'd expect: opening tables, guessing at relationships, breaking things in a test environment until I understood why they broke. Over time that turned into something more systematic — I ended up documenting 390 tables and 514 foreign keys across roughly 40 functional modules, entirely from observation. No vendor documentation, no source code access. Just structure, inference, and a lot of trial and error. Some of what I learned only reveals itself under pressure: Firebird's SQL dialect has its own quirks — FIRST 1 instead of LIMIT , for one. Small thing, but it breaks every query you copy-paste from a Postgres tutorial. Primary keys aren't auto-incrementing in the way you'd assume. They're driven by generators ( GEN_ID ), and if you write a record without syncing

Three years ago, I started my journey as a developer with a pretty simple idea: Learn to code, gain experience, become good at it. Three years later, I’ve learned a lot — but I’ve also realized that becoming a developer isn't as straightforward as I imagined. I've worked with JavaScript, React, Laravel, PlayCanvas, WebGL, and other technologies. I've worked on real projects, dealt with bugs I didn't understand at first, learned technologies because a project required them, and worked alongside other people to get things done. I think one of my strengths has always been learning new technologies and adapting to new problems. But there are things I'm not proud of. I've never been particularly good at finishing personal projects by myself. I've started many things, learned from them, experimented with different technologies, but I rarely took them all the way to completion. I also don't have an impressive GitHub contribution graph. I haven't spent the last three years consistently building open-source projects or pushing code every day. And if I'm being completely honest, I don't think I've mastered any particular technology. I'm good enough to build things. I'm good enough to understand code, solve problems, learn what I don't know, and contribute to a team. But I'm not at the level where I'd confidently say: "This is the thing I'm an expert at." And recently, AI has made me think about this even more. I'm not afraid of AI taking over jobs. I actually think the capabilities we're getting are incredible. What concerns me is more personal: If AI can already build many of the things I've spent years learning to build, then what should I be becoming as a developer? For a while, I felt overwhelmed by that question. Should I learn more technologies? Should I specialize? Should I focus on fundamentals? Should I build more projects? Should I contribute to open source? Should I learn AI? I'm realizing that the answer probably isn't to chase everything. My next goal isn't to co

For years, I thought being a good programmer meant knowing your stack really well. I was a Laravel developer, A React developer, A Node.js developer and A Go developer. And there was some truth to that. I spent years working with Laravel, for example, and naturally became faster at solving problems with Laravel. I know the ecosystem, the common mistakes, the packages, the conventions, and probably a few things that weren't even written in the documentation. My stack became part of my identity as a developer. But I think AI is slowly changing that. Not because frameworks and programming languages don't matter anymore. They obviously do. It's because AI has made moving between them much easier. Today, I can open a codebase written in a language or framework I haven't touched in years, or maybe have never used seriously, and get productive much faster than I could before. I can ask AI to explain the project structure. I can ask it to explain a piece of code. I can ask it to translate something I understand in PHP into Go. I can ask it to help me write tests. I can use it while debugging. I can even ask it why a particular approach might be a bad idea. That doesn't suddenly make me an expert in that technology. But it means I don't need to spend weeks just getting comfortable enough to start solving the actual problem. And I think that's a pretty big change. Your Stack Is Becoming Less Important There was a time when knowing a technology itself was a significant advantage. If you knew Laravel, you had to learn Laravel. If you wanted to learn React, you had to spend time understanding React. If you wanted to work with Kubernetes, good luck. You read documentation, watched tutorials, built things, broke things, fixed them, and slowly built up experience. That's still how you become good. But AI has changed the entry point. The first few hours with a new technology are no longer as painful as they used to be. You can have an AI sitting beside you explaining things as you g

Ten things started is not progress. It's ten open tabs in your head, each one costing rent. Every unfinished task keeps a little of your attention hostage. You feel busy. You are just fragmented. Finishing one small thing returns more energy than starting three. So close the loop. Merge the PR. Send the message. Delete the branch. An empty background is where good work actually happens. Done is quiet. Chase the quiet. – Serguey Asael Shinder

Study finds wait times for cancer surgeries hit 10-year high.