Using AI Coding Assistants Without Getting Worse at Coding
AI assistants can make you dramatically faster or quietly make you dependent. How to prompt with context, review generated code, protect your learning, and know when to switch it off.
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Tips & writing
Notes from the workbench
Practical engineering tips, design theory and performance breakdowns — written for developers and founders who like their advice tested in production.
Filtering by tag #best-practices — clear
Web Accessibility Basics Every Developer Should Know
Accessibility isn't a special feature for a few users. It's what makes a site usable for everyone, and much of it is free if you use HTML correctly. The essentials, with quick ways to test.
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Is TypeScript Worth It? An Honest Look for JavaScript Developers
TypeScript catches bugs before they ship and makes refactoring far less scary, but it has real costs. What you gain, what it won't do for you, and how to adopt it without a painful rewrite.
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Web Application Security Checklist for Full Stack Developers
You don't need to be a security specialist to avoid the bugs attackers exploit most. A practical checklist covering injection, XSS, CSRF, access control, secrets, dependencies and headers.
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Database Migrations Best Practices: Change Your Schema Without Fear
Schema changes cause more scary deploys than almost anything else. How migrations work, the rules that keep them safe, and the expand-and-contract pattern for changes with zero downtime.
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Clean Code Tips That Make a Real Difference
Clean code isn't about rules from a book. It's about the next person reading your code, who is often you. Practical habits for naming, functions, comments and structure that pay off every week.
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Code Review Best Practices for Authors and Reviewers
Good code reviews catch bugs, spread knowledge and make teams faster. Bad ones create bottlenecks and resentment. How to write pull requests people want to review, and how to review them kindly.
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Git Branching Strategies: Trunk-Based, GitHub Flow and Git Flow
How your team uses branches shapes how fast you ship and how painful merges are. The three common strategies compared, plus commit message conventions and the rebase vs merge question.
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Environment Variables Done Right: .env Files, Secrets and Config
"It works on my machine" is usually a config problem. A practical guide to .env files, public vs private variables, validation at startup, and keeping secrets out of your repo.
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