Hi, I'm Jesse Skinner.
I'm a self-employed web developer. I love writing code, and writing about writing code. Sometimes I make videos too.
Feel free to email me if you have any questions or just want to share your story or something you're excited about.
Recent Articles
Empower your clients to make changes
When a client asks me to make a change to a website, I have two choices. I can go and make the change. Or, I can set things up so that the client can make the change themselves. It's not always obvious which of these two will be a better use of my time. If it's a one-time change that will never need to happen again, of course it's better if I go make the change. But sometimes it's...
How I feel about AI
I love AI. I love how magical LLMs are. Just by predicting what word comes next, they can impersonate a real person. They have more personality than the computer in Star Trek. They also make more mistakes. I'm frustrated with AI. I try to use them for programming, and end up going down a rabbit hole based on a hallucination. The confidence of an LLM becomes my over-confidence. I get so...
I refuse to be a slave to The Algorithm
It used to be fun to post online and share things with friends. It didn't matter what you said or did, you'd get comments and likes from your friends. Now, that has all changed. I don't remember when The Algorithm showed up. At first nobody noticed. Our feeds didn't change much. When we opened the Social Network, we'd see some big news from a friend at the top. It was helpful...
Autumn: A time to simplify
Today is Battery Collection Day in my city. A chance to say goodbye to all those dead batteries I've been collecting all year. I put them out with the many bags of dead leaves I raked this week. There's also a recycling box full of old paperwork I managed to get rid of while cleaning my office. Autumn is naturally a time to purge and simplify. Animals retreat into their homes, stockpiling...
Does your web server scale down?
Are you paying for servers sitting idle in the middle of the night? When we talk about scaling a web server, we often focus on scaling up. Can your server handle a spike in traffic? As your business grows, can your database handle the growth? There's less focus on scaling down. It makes sense, because most businesses are focused on growth. Not too many are looking to shrink. But if you're...
Goldilocks and the Three Developers
Goldilocks was the lead of a software development team. She needed to review pull requests from three of her team members. The first developer's code was a mess. It relied on some deprecated features of an outdated library. The few modules were long and complex, trying to do too many different things. There were no tests, so it was impossible to be sure the code was bug-free. The architecture...
You don't need permission
You don't need permission to write the highest quality code you can. You don't need permission to design a reliable server architecture that won't crash. You don't need permission to develop a suite of tests to ensure bugs are caught early. You don't need permission to upgrade your dependencies, to ensure your system stays secure and modern. Your boss, manager or client will...
Web apps that last
When you're building a new web application, or even a new feature, how can you ensure that you're not creating a nightmare code base that will need to be rewritten completely in a few years? Some people will say it's hopeless to even try and write code that will last. I've even heard people suggest that you should aim to rewrite all your code every few years. That sounds like a...
Debugging a slow web app
I got an email today from one of my clients, letting me know that one of his web apps was down. He said he was getting an error and asked me to take a look. In the end, I was able to fix it and get it running faster than ever. What caused it turned out to be a huge surprise to me. I thought I'd outline the steps I went through here, to try to help others trying to solve similar problems in...
