Alex's Blog

My Website (Case Study)

I enjoy keeping personal projects moving and when I get time I like to play with new and different technologies, when I run out of ideas I end-up falling back to just rebuilding my website which has had a number of iterations over the years as it is a fun

case study

Chinsay - Smart Clauses (Case Study)

During my time at Chinsay I was responsible for working with the in house document editor to enhance and add new features and functionality to it as required by the clients. This case study follows along with the smart clause feature I led and helped move through to completion, it

case study

Impala - No Code (Case Study)

My time at Impala was pretty short and I was not able to really accomplish as much as I would have liked, in reality I had just started to get settled into the work and taking over the frontend before the company had a major restructuring and I ended up

general

Road map for 2022, Times are a changing

2020 and 2021 have been very eventful years I feel I have grown a lot in my career and overall, in reality there is little to be openly disappointed in. I of course didn't achieve everything I set-out to do but I did achieve a lot and plenty

updates

Look back on 2021

2021 has been another one of those weird years really with many things still remaining the same in the fallout from 2020, and in many ways 2020 was a great year for me in many ways 2021 continued to trend well in many aspects but I exit the year in

engineering

The Mindset Of A Productive Developer

Being a professional developer is much more than just being able to push quality code everyday, that is of course a part of it but this is only the beginning and in order to really progress and improve in a fast moving industry there are many skills required to not

engineering

The 2021 High Level Road Map

Last year was a busy year I achieved a lot looking back on it, but not what I had planned for. With switching jobs and many challenges over the year a lot of my learning goals morphed into new objectives, still equally as valuable but shifting myself away from my

Off Topic

Year Wrap 2020... That Year

2020 has been a rather long and eventful year, everyone I am sure has many tales about how their year has been, some good and some bad. For me 2020 has not been a bad year in many ways is has been one of my defining years for many reasons,

coding

App Misadventures Part 3: The Core

Apps are always a complex item to build out and starting from scratch is both one of the greatest advantages and biggest worry as a developer. On one hand you have absolute control over the project and can bend it to your own style. On the other hand you have

Full Stack

App Misadventures Part 2: Config

When starting a new project getting the base right is vital, you need to ensure that what you are working with will be robust enough to propel your project ahead. This is of course a daunting task, how can you ever know exactly where your project will lead you and

coding

App Misadventures Part 1: Planning

Now I have a goal, I have a purpose and a fairly clear understanding of where I need to head. An app like this can be huge, it can grow exponentially, it must be planned, it must be focused and I must pull out all the vital concepts and items

coding

App Misadventures: Part 0 - Beginnings

2020 has been quite a year, there has been a lot of lows some highs and an awful lot of change. I have accomplished a good amount that I didn't expect to this year and also failed to achieve others I had in my sight, it has been

Hacktoberfest 2020

Last year I started to work on finishing up HacktoberFest but being new to the open source community I ended up letting it lapse and didn't really manage much. This year I was determined to get it done, then 2020 happened I forgot all about it until the

engineering

The Full Stack Lie

It's pretty common place to see adverts and companies looking for full stack developers, this of course makes a whole lot of sense for smaller companies they want that jack of all trades that generalist to plug the many gaps they just don't have the budget

engineering

Getting Back In The Groove

This year has been quite a year a lot of happenee both globally and with my own life as well, it has been a long one but I'll do some year retrospectives eventually now I need to get myself moving with my own personal projects and outside learning

Starting A New Job Remotely

Starting a new job is always a troubling and stressful time. You are learning all the new processes; being bombarded with meetings, on-boarding well new information from every direction; and you are trying to get to know everyone, it really is a busy and stressful time and then you factor

interviews

Looking For A Job In A Crisis

Looking for work is always a very trying experience it takes a lot of time and you are basically just repeating yourself over and over again for what feels like an eternity, so what could be worse than looking for work during COVID-19! I had the unenvious task recently of

React

React Hooks The Rundown

In late 2018 Facebook changed the face of React by adding in Hook, a new way to write apps wholely relying on functional components and with other libraries implementing hooks along with the core library now everything can be done using the new design. We adopted hooks into our app

coding

A Simple Rust Rocket Service

In my quest to build up my understanding of Rust I decided to play with Rocket the web framework for Rust, but I had to find inspiration on what to actually do in Rocket. As this was my first time using it Rocket I just wanted something small and easy

coding

The State of Rust

Rust is a language I am determined to get more practice down this year and I have been really interested in Rocket which is a modern web framework for Rust that is pretty nice and rather powerful. Rocket provides a pretty robust api to create some very well designed web

Off Topic

New Year New Code

It has been a bit of time since I've added on to here, as the end of year has proven to be rather busy and with the new arrival of our son (Max) in late December we have had our hands rather full. This has taken a lot

coding

Plans For The Year Ahead

Technology is a forever moving and evolving entity and with it the work. We are required to be always learning and advancing and at this retrospective time of year it is no better time than to start planning for the next year. There is a lot to consider for the

coding

Why JavaScript Needs Typescript

One of JavaScripts greatest strengths is how flexible it is, it is however also one of its biggest weaknesses as JavaScript allows you to get a lot done quickly however it allows for pretty much any style you want and this on any large project usually ends in chaos. JavaScript

coding

Lets Get Functional

The time of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) ruling the landscape seems to be coming to an end and although a lot of the alternatives are not exactly new they do offer some paradigms which were missing and at the very least encourage a little more flexibility within the development space.

coding

My React Journey One Year On

I started my frontend journey with Angular 1.x, I briefly worked with jQuery but really I started With Angular and it was such a step up from Vanilla JS and provided some awesome reactive functions! I loved Angular I had got use to the syntax and was creating some