jack marchant

I listened to a podcast recently with James Cowling on The Peterman Pod and one of the topics James talks about is the concept of leading by example, specifically why you shouldn’t.

Coding agents aren't just speeding up development, they're changing what it means to be a senior engineer.

The question everyone’s asking It’s the topic on everyone’s mind, especially software engineers.

I've been spending more time thinking about how I work with agents than the actual code they produce.

There's a lot going on in the world of AI right now, so in an effort to cut through the noise, I thought it would be interesting to write down my current practices with AI — both as a time capsule to refer back to next year, and as a challenge to rethink…

To truly leverage the power of AI in software engineering, we need to move beyond simple code completion.

A common question in software engineering interviews is how can you speed up a slow query?

I spend most of my time thinking about performance improvements.

Asynchronous programming is a foundational building block for scaling web applications due to the increasing need to do more in each web request.

I have mixed feelings about feature flags.

When I first started interviewing candidates for engineering roles, I was very nervous.

Dependency Injection is the method of passing objects to another (usually during instantiation) to invert the dependency created when you use an object.

Working from home has been thrust upon those lucky enough to still have a job.

One of the most useful tips that has guided much of my decision over the years has been this simple principle: three steps, executed in sequential order; Make it work Make it right Make it fast These steps outline the process through which software should…

Code Reviews are one of the easiest ways to help your team-mates.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about why testing is important, but in this post I thought I would expand on that and talk about why not only unit testing is important, but how a full spectrum of automated tests can improve productivity, increase con…

Design Patterns allow you to create abstractions that decouple sections of a codebase with the purpose of making a change to the code later a much easier process.

Umbrella apps are big projects that contain multiple mix projects.

Ever get the feeling that adding this "one little hack", a couple of lines of code, won't have much of an impact on the rest of the codebase?

Last week was Lonestar ElixirConf 2019 held in Austin, Texas.

In most cases I have found inter-process communication to be an unnecessary overhead for the work I have been doing.

When we think about what an application does, it's typical to think of how it behaves in context of its dependencies.

When you're browsing your way through Elixir documentation or reading blog posts (like this one), there's no doubt you'll come across a GenServer.

Typically in an application with a database, you might have more records than you can fit on a page or in a single result set from a query.

Protocols are a way to implement polymorphism in Elixir.

Recently, I've been writing a tonne of Elixir code, some Phoenix websites and a few other small Elixir applications.

While writing Understanding Concurrency in Elixir I started to grasp processes more than I have before.

Concurrency in Elixir is a big selling point for the language, but what does it really mean for the code that we write in Elixir?

Ecto is an Elixir library, which allows you to define schemas that map to database tables.

We often think about Streaming as being the way we watch multimedia content such as video/audio.

A Queue is a collection data structure, which uses the FIFO (First In, First Out) method.

Elixir is a functional language, so it’s no surprise that one of the main building blocks of the request-response cycle is the humble Plug.

A Supervision Tree in Elixir has quite a number of parallels to how developers using React think about a component tree.

Technical debt is a potentially crippling disease that can take over your codebase without much warning.

Before being introduced to Elixir, a functional programming language built on top of Erlang, I had no idea what pattern matching was.

Elixir is a functional programming language based on Erlang.

Unit testing can sometimes be a tricky subject no matter what language you’re writing in.