Category: Coding

Two weeks ago, my team made the call to replace our authentication system. Not because it was broken — it worked fine. But it was holding us back in ways that became obvious only when we tried to move fast. Why We Decided to Change Our original auth was a custom solution built years ago…

I used to reach for useEffect for everything. Data fetching? useEffect. Form validation? useEffect. Syncing state? useEffect. My components looked like chaos, and I couldn’t figure out why my code felt so hard to maintain. Then I learned something that changed how I write React: useEffect is not the answer for most problems. The Problem…

Let me be honest — I used to think error handling was boring. Just wrap things in try-catch and move on, right? Wrong. That mindset cost us hours of debugging at 2 AM. After dealing with enough production fires, I started collecting patterns that actually work. These aren’t theoretical best practices — they’re the things…

For years, I wrapped everything in try-catch blocks. Every function, every API call, every database query. I thought that’s what defensive programming looked like. I was wrong. The Problem with Catching Everything When you catch exceptions at every level, you lose context. You mask real errors. You make debugging a nightmare because you never know…

Why I Ditched the Library For years, I used Auth0, Firebase Auth, and Passport.js without thinking twice. They handled the hard stuff — token management, security patches, OAuth flows. Why reinvent the wheel? Then I joined a startup with a tight budget and a weird requirement: we needed custom auth logic that didn’t fit any…

For years, I was that developer. The one who insisted on 90% code coverage. Who would spend hours writing tests for every function, every edge case, every tiny module. I thought more tests meant better code. I was wrong. The Test Everything Mentality It started when I joined my first proper dev team. The senior…

I’ve been revisiting some of my older codebases lately, and something keeps hitting me: most of the problems I solved didn’t need to be solved at all. Looking back at thousands of lines I once thought were genius architecture, I now see complexity that actively hurt the systems I was building. The Engineering Ego Trap…