In 2018, I was coasting. I didn’t like it. Life was good, I was steadily employed as a senior developer. We had a good team. We were building valuable software for our customers. Everything seemed great. But I’d been coasting for a few years. I believed I could coast for a few years more (I was wrong) but I was uncomfortable. I needed to fix it. I went through books, articles, podcasts and more books.| jamesdunne.dev
A client came to me in full panic mode. AWS had put their SES account under review. Their complaint rate had shot up to 0.6% overnight, and they woke up to a scary (automated) message from AWS. A bug had caused an email to go out to around 20,000 people. Another bug sent the email up to nine times instead of once. Many of those email addresses had opted-out and they were not happy.| jamesdunne.dev
I am now a remote worker. Out of necessity. And after years of scepticism… I love it. I didn’t think remote work would work for me. I was wrong. Remote working has big perks. TLDR Benefits You have hidden costs when you work in an office. Before remote working, you can’t see these costs. They’re normal. Commuting wastes time. I now have more personal time. Time to spend on my craft and my family.| jamesdunne.dev
The MEAN stack is everywhere. Proponents promise getting started is easy. Hundreds of boot camps provide crash courses promising a MEAN stack job. You don’t owe them until you get hired. No win, no fee. Developers write thousands of words teaching the stack, preaching the benefits. Become a “full stack developer” in as little as twelve weeks. It’s adored by greenfield developers. They can build new projects fast. And move on even faster.| jamesdunne.dev
Forget programs. The most important productivity tool for programming is your mind. And the next best set of software development tools are ones that take care of you. It isn’t about Git. Or Docker. Or testing frameworks. These are all useful tools. I use them daily. But they are not the most important software development tools. Your wellbeing is, in fact, the most important factor in your ability to write good software.| jamesdunne.dev