Featured post

Refraction has been acquired by Twistag

I'm super excited to announce that earlier today, Refraction was acquired by Twistag — a Lisbon based design and software agency who focus on delivering amazing digital products. Powered by OpenAI, Refraction is a suite of tools for developers to ge
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2024

Simulating Row-Level Security in MySQL with Clerk and Prisma

Row-level security (RLS) is a popular PostgreSQL concept where tables can have row security policies that restrict, on a per-user basis, which rows can be returned by normal queries or inserted, updated, or deleted by data modification commands. Unf
Oct 9, 2024 • 5 min read

Secure Linear OAuth2 flow with Next.js and React Server Components

Normally I don't take time out to write about something as well documented as OAuth2, but I was so impressed with how easy it was to build a custom OAuth2 flow with Next.js and React Server Components that I had to share it. I'm going to run you thr
Mar 10, 2024 • 11 min read

2023

Neutral is shutting down

It's been an incredibly rewarding journey for me to help you plant 4613 trees around the world. Together, we have planted a forest - not just of trees but of hope and unified action towards a healthier world. Every tree planted and every ounce of car
Sep 5, 2023 • 3 min read

Streaming OpenAI completions with the Vercel Edge Runtime

I recently built an AI-powered development tool (Refraction) using the OpenAI API. I was really impressed with the results of OpenAI and Vercel, so I wanted to share how I built both tools in less than 2 days. One of the key components of this build
Jan 14, 2023 • 12 min read

Making react-syntax-highlighter "editable"

The React library react-syntax-highlighter package is a handy little utility for highlighting code snippets. It supports a wide variety of languages and has a bunch of different themes. While it's very easy to use, it has one major drawback: it's not
Jan 13, 2023 • 5 min read

2022

Enabling HSTS Preload in Next.js

HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security, and it is a security measure that helps protect against man-in-the-middle attacks by ensuring that a web browser can only connect to a website using a secure HTTPS connection. When a website has HSTS en
Dec 8, 2022 • 4 min read

Replacing JS Libraries with Intl

JavaScript is a versatile language that is used in many web applications to add interactivity and dynamic features. To help developers work with dates and times, there are several popular libraries such as Moment.js and date-fns. These libraries prov
Dec 7, 2022 • 6 min read

Using clsx with Tailwind CSS for element style composition

Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework that makes it easy to quickly create well-designed pages without having to work with CSS files or write rules from scratch. One of the key features of Tailwind is that it uses utility classes, which are short
Dec 3, 2022 • 4 min read

Handy Body and Error Parsing Utilities for Next.js

When dealing with requests and errors in Next.js API routes, we want to make sure that we are handling them in a way that is consistent and predictable. Unfortunately, we're not always given great typings for free and sometimes we have to do a little
Dec 1, 2022 • 5 min read

Why Figma's AutoLayout system is brilliant for writing code

The AutoLayout system in Figma is a tool that helps designers to create flexible and responsive layouts for their designs. It allows designers to specify constraints for the position and size of elements within a layout, and then automatically adjust
Nov 30, 2022 • 4 min read

Optimizing your Next.js personal website's SEO with next-seo

The next-seo library is a powerful tool for optimizing the technical SEO of a Next.js website. The library offers a range of components that can be used to improve the search engine visibility and parsing of a website. In this post, we'll explore fiv
Nov 27, 2022 • 7 min read

Creating active link class modifiers with Tailwind and Next.js 13

An active class wrapper is a way to add a special class to an HTML element when the link matches the current page, which is useful for highlighting a menu item in a navbar. While this is common practice, it becomes slightly more interesting to execut
Nov 25, 2022 • 6 min read

Optimizing Next.js images for speed and quality

Next.js's built-in image component (next/image) provides a simple and efficient way to handle responsive images in your Next.js app. It's a wrapper around the standard HTML <img> element with added features and functionality specifically tailored for
Nov 22, 2022 • 5 min read

Creating a no-auth Spotify playlist preview with Next.js

I've been spending a lot of time on Spotify lately and wanted to share some of my playlists on the web. But just linking out to the playlist didn't feel right, so I spent some time messing around with the Spotify API to see what was actually possible
Apr 2, 2022 • 18 min read

Stripe PaymentSheet subscriptions with Apple / Google Pay on Expo and Firebase

Okay so I know the title is a bit of a mouthful but today's post is actually pretty neat - we're putting together a full, end-to-end Stripe subscription flow in our Expo app with Firebase. We're going to use PaymentSheet to handle the checkout experi
Jan 29, 2022 • 14 min read

Implementing Push Notifications with Expo and Firebase Cloud Functions

Today we're going to implement Push Notifications in an Expo app using Firebase Cloud Functions - how exciting! Despite how complex Expo's diagrams appear, it's actually remarkably simple to add Push Notifications to your app! Let's get started. D
Jan 29, 2022 • 9 min read

Implementing a smart analytics hook for Firebase and Amplitude in Expo 44+

In today's show, we're creating a smart analytics hook for Firebase Analytics and Amplitude using Expo! What does "smart" mean? I'm glad you asked! It means: 1. It allows us to send a single event to both platforms concurrently and consistentl
Jan 28, 2022 • 23 min read

Implementing a simple OTA update function with Typescript and Expo 44+

I'm currently migrating away from Expo's OTA updates to purely store-managed EAS updates to simplify my development workflow and noticed I'd written a handy script I could share for handling OTA updates. Overview To preface - Expo have a handy exp
Jan 28, 2022 • 6 min read

2021

Neat User and Profile React Hooks for Firebase V9

For a good while, I've been relying on a little package called react-firebase-hooks to turn my Firebase realtime document fetching into tidy hooks. However, this library has become a bit sketchy since the release of Firebase v9 a.k.a the Modular edit
Dec 24, 2021 • 6 min read

Implementing Google and Apple login hooks with Expo 43 and Firebase v9

I'm starting on a new mobile project this weekend and decided to implement my auth system properly this time, using neat hooks and a credential-based social login system. Our tech stack for this project will include React Native, Expo 43 (which came
Oct 23, 2021 • 15 min read

Finding a user's friends in their Contacts with Firebase and Expo

I'm currently building an app that runs of phone numbers as the primary authentication method, then lets you add friends by allowing access to your contacts list. While this sounds pretty straightforward, it's actually pretty hectic once you get int
May 18, 2021 • 9 min read

Upload images to Firebase using Expo 39+ managed workflow

Typically, uploading images to Firebase using the JavaScript SDK is pretty straightforward. All we need to do is create a root reference to our storage: // Get the local file const file = fetch('...'); // Create a root reference const storageRef =
May 18, 2021 • 4 min read

Using the Firebase Local Emulator with Expo's managed workflow

Firebase is Google's mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality apps and grow your business. They acquired it in 2014 and now use it as their flagship offering for app development. It's essentially a high-level UI and SDK that sits o
May 18, 2021 • 6 min read

2017

The story of Presumi

I've learnt a lot from starting a company from nothing. Most of it has come from the experience of working in startups and talking with the founders, some has come from books. But there's certain things you can only learn by doing — moments of the st
Aug 17, 2017 • 17 min read

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