Aurelio Ogliari

I like to watch talks during my lunch breaks, so I share some of the best ones I bump into, along with my notes.

Have you ever wondered what makes a team a great one? I never did, until I had to create one.

While nearly everyone on paper agrees that code reviews are “a good thing” and everyone should do them, the reality often tells a different story. Big teams and companies all pretty much have a code review process in place. On the other hand, small startups often skip this step, especially at the early stages of their life.

Have you ever been asked this question: 

One of the most satisfying feelings in life is waking up at 5am, going to the kitchen to drink a glass of water while casually scrolling through Twitter on your phone and finding someone (on the Twitter feed, not in the kitchen) that is right on the internet*:

D3 has been the go-to library for in browser data visualisation for many years by now. While JavaScript libraries are notorious for being extremely transient and easily replaced by newer, shinier alternatives, for some reason this does not seem to apply to D3.

I sometimes like to watch a talk during my lunch breaks, so I decided to share some of the best ones I bump into, along with my notes. I try to keep the topics fairly language agnostic (after all it’s a lunch break).

Postman is one my favourite tools at work to test APIs. Even at a simple level Postman easily becomes invaluable. At the same time, devoting a little effort in learning some of its best features can quickly boost our productivity and development speed.

Spreading props on a React Component is a very common pattern that I picked up very easily and loved from day 1. With time though I learnt to understand the implications of using the spread operator in different contexts and came to the conclusion that most of the time spreading props in React is best avoided. Let’s see why.

Scales are an extremely flexible feature of D3.js. Even though in many cases our need is just to have a function that maps one value in the domain to one value in the range, sometimes it can be handy to have a mapping from one to many values.

Arrays are the natural data structure for looping over data in JavaScript. While the native methods such as map, reduce, filter etc will provide a good base for pretty much any operation on arrays, many libraries and frameworks enrich the native set of functions with domain specific utilities.

It’s quite common when coding to have the need to view multiple files at once on the screen. At times, we might even want to view two different parts of the same (long) file. Other times again we just want to make the most of a widescreen monitor.

Code folding can make browsing long files easier. When we’re trying to focus on the big picture without being distracted by smaller details code folding can be an invaluable aid.

A common pattern in Js when dealing with a pre-defined set of string values is to enclose them in an object and use it as a map.

Colours can be a powerful visual hint in a data visualisation. A good rule of thumb though is to use them sparingly, only when they add something meaningful to the chart and not just because they are pretty.

Lodash is pretty much the de-facto standard when we’re looking for a utility library for data manipulation in JavaScript. So much that it is the most depended on package on npm.

One of the funniest and most overused memes of the JavaScript side of the Internet world is surely the one below.

If you’re an avid Evernote user like me chances are you have been bugged by a very annoying “feature”. Whenever you click on an external link from on of your Notes you will be redirected to a sort of confirmation screen that warns you that you are leaving Evernote.