Thomas Schoffelen

I'm a massive fan of building not just a product, but a platform - not only solving a specific product for a user, but building a foundation to allow others to solve their own problems using your system.

If you give the exact same test to two comparable classes of students, once digitally and once on paper, it's likely you'll see measurably different results.

Sometimes, you want to make sure you show a UI element to let the user know a new version of the front-app of your application is available.

I had a use case recently where I was building a custom framework for managing background jobs.

One of the things I really enjoy about the co-founders I've currently surrounded myself with, is our shared goal of longevity.

I used to be a 'plain' React Native guy, but I've really grown to enjoy using Expo for the last few apps I've built.

QTI stands for Question and Test Interoperability, and is a standard for exchanging assessment content (and results) between systems.

My daily notes in Obsidian are the cornerstone of my note taking and journaling.

When you're building a new product at a small startup, speed and flexibility are of the essence.

I really like how in Linear, if you press Cmd + C, which is listed as 'Copy issue title', it will copy the title as plain text, but also as an HTML link, so that if you paste it in a Google Doc or in Obsidian, it will show a link to that issue.

When I started building the current iteration of the Street Art Cities platform a few years ago, I decided on the following core entities: Site Marker A Site can have multiple Markers, and a Marker is connected to a single Site.

There's a bunch of cool rate limiting packages out there for the Hono web framework, but I wanted something simple that worked for my specific use case, where I want to rate limit per user.

When I was a child, one time my dad told me a story about a group of robbers sitting under a blade of grass.

I started out as a developer building Wordpress websites when I was in my early teens.

Alfred has long been my launcher of choice, and I have dozens of custom workflows built for it, including lots of internal tools that help me quickly look up items in the databases of my various projects.

Examplary is a new tool we're building to help teachers create better tests and exams.

When John Oliver did a segment on Last Week Tonight about tech monopolies a few years ago, I was quite hesitant about the "break up big tech" message.

Whenever people talk about GenAI as the 'next big thing', the lineage of previous 'big things' seems very variable on the speaker.

Maybe it's taken too long, but I more and more am actually integrating little LLM tools into my daily workflows, other than coding and chat.

PDF.js is one of those libraries that seems amazing in its scope – it's able to render basically any PDF you throw at it into an HTML canvas, with all of the weirdness of the PDF file format.

Safe Exam Browser is an app that can be installed on Mac, Windows and iOS to create a safe test taking environment for students that prevents some basic ways of cheating, e.g. by switching to other apps, or copying and pasting content.

There's this urge that I – and based on the subreddits I visit, a lot of people that are into productivity tools – have, of wanting to find a perfect system where all of your notes and data are in one place.

When you're working on a web app that runs in multiple environments (dev, staging, production), it's easy to get confused and get frustrated about a change not working, only to realise that you've been refreshing the production app rather than your locally

Apple and Google's app review process for getting a new version of an app released into the App Store and Google Play is pretty fast these days, often taking less than 48 hours, and frequently even under 24 hours.

I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the governance of online communities.

We've been talking for a while about how we can be better at informing the Street Art Cities community about new features and changes to our platform.

Flexible Feed is a small Shopify app I built a few years ago.

I've been reminiscing a lot lately.

Last summer, I started building TraceStack: A serverless observability tool for AWS Lambda.

I've been doing some diagrams to explain certain AI app development concepts to my team.

Recently, we switched the Street Art Cities dashboard (where users upload artworks, create routes, view insights, etc.) from a massive monolithic Next.js app – that also contained the many pages of our website!

I've been building out our NearSt Engineering Blog over the last couple of days, and one of the things I ran into is the need to show syntax-highlighted code in some of the blog posts.

I really love the markdown editor on GitHub, especially how easy it is to drop in files and images.

I was looking at a video about the new version of Apple's MapKit JS, their web maps library, and they showed how to initialise the SDK by loading the script.

For a while now, my personal website has been built using Next.js, running on Vercel.

Imagine you're building a <Button> component.

I've complained about it before, but I still don't understand the Apple pundits that come out every year when new iPads are released to complain about the iPad software not supporting enough pro workflows - usually with the request to have some way to dual

I'm starting to get into the habit of consistently writing JSDoc comments for my front-end components, which helps with explaining usage of a component, and gets rid of VSCode’s red squiggles because it can't figure out the type of certain props.

Recently, I've become a really massive fan of tags and attributes as ways of allowing users on the platforms I build to structure data.

I woke up at around 6am after my first night's sleep on the train.

Our California Zephyr train left Emeryville (just outside San Francisco, a 15 minute Uber from my hotel) a few minutes late.

The Node 16 runtime on Lambda will be deprecated in June.

If you implement in-app purchases in your app, you might want to show users a way to manage that subscription by showing links to the App Store or Google Play app.

I released my first Shopify app a few years ago.

Engineers spend a lot of their time debugging issues.

One of my side projects that gets considerable traffic finally used up all its free Algolia credits.

I'm a software engineer and startup founder from The Netherlands, currently living in London.

Back in 2020 and 2021, I was a heavy user of personal knowledge management (PKMS) tools.

Advent of Code has started again!

I've used an iPad since the very first year it was introduced.