- Frontend Dev – What a Frontend Engineer Actually Does
The job, described by what lands in your queue rather than by a job posting. What you own — the interface, the state behind it, what happens on a slow phone, and whether somebody using a keyboard can get through it — where the line sits between you and design, backend and QA, and what a real ticket looks like from mockup to deploy.
- Java 21 Other Improvements
Virtual threads dominated the Java 21 release notes, and several smaller additions arrived alongside them. These are the ones worth knowing about. String templates — and why you cannot use them Worth addressing first because you will find articles recommending them. String templates were previewed…
- Terraform – count, for_each and Dynamic Blocks
Three subnets should not be three copy-pasted blocks. `count` and its index, `for_each` over a map or a set, and the specific reason `count` will destroy and recreate half your resources when you remove one from the middle of a list. Then `for` expressions, `dynamic` blocks for repeated nested blocks, and the conditional expression.
- React Native – Taking Payments with Stripe
A worked native-module example that happens to involve money. Stripe's PaymentSheet rather than a card form of your own — the card never touches your code, which is what keeps you out of PCI scope. The two-step flow and why the order must exist before the sheet opens, treating a dismissed sheet as cancelled rather than failed, and the rule that outranks all of it: the device is never the authority on whether a payment succeeded.
- TypeScript – Narrowing and Type Guards
Narrowing is what makes unions usable: typeof, instanceof, the in operator, truthiness and equality all teach the checker something. Then the two you write yourself — a predicate returning `x is Thing`, and the discriminated union — plus the never trick that turns a forgotten case into a build failure instead of a blank badge.