Jonathan's Blog

Sometimes when talking about testing, I think we have a tendency to resort to broad ideas and jargon without sufficiently explaining what these things might look like in practice.

It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on my employer’s blog titled Undo, Redo, and the Command Pattern, which I ended up quite pleased with.

This is a short note to document storing data in JS’s bigint type.

Here’s a belief I’ve held for a while but only recently been able to put into words: explanatory comments are often easier to understand than explanatory variable or function names.

If you’re used to React, you’re probably used to using useEffect to run side-effectful code, such as integrating with third-party libraries or setting up MutationObservers1.

A bit over a month ago, I switched my blog over to BunnyCDN.

This is a quick post to point out a potential issue that might catch you out with using Fastify’s sessions mechanism alongside tRPC’s websockets transport, and how I’ve fixed it in my projects.

Update, 2025-04-16: I wrote a follow-up post after about a month of usage, and you can read that here.

Jujutsu is a relatively new version control system that is designed around working directly with commit-like objects called “changes”1.

I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things.

During the Pandemic, I found the YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic, which is run by two champion puzzlers, Simon and Mark, who solve various logic puzzles, focusing mainly on variant sudoku.

As of the beginning of September, I’ve been programming “with purpose” for a decade.

I enjoy reading other people’s blog posts, but I often enjoy reading the comments more.

Why do you write tests?

Javascript’s new “Explicit Resource Management” proposal adds the using statement, a way to automatically close resources after you’ve finished using them.

I’ve updated my blog.

You can also find an edited and updated version of this post that I wrote for my employer’s blog here.

This post is a reply to Without Boat’s article “Patterns & Abstractions”.

This review is largely in response to the article “It’s probably time to stop recommending Clean Code”, and the ensuing Reddit discussion.