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
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...
Setting up a new computer
I love getting a new computer. I don't copy over all my files from my old computer anymore. Instead, I like to use it as a chance for a fresh start. I have a vision, but so far it's been only a dream. My vision is that I could get access to any new computer, and within a few minutes be totally up and running with my full developer work environment, all my photos and videos, my documents,...
Svelte 5 is here!
In case you missed it, Svelte 5 was finally released! It's been here for a while as a pre-release, but I held off on using it until it was finalized. (I didn't want to learn how to use the new syntax and then have to un-learn and re-learn as the team reworked things and added or removed functionality. But now these decisions have been finalized, the syntax is cemented, and I'm excited...
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 It relied on some deprecated features of an outdated library.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...
If an error is logged in the cloud, does it make a sound?
If a user sees an error message on your web server, how do you find out? Does the user report it directly, if they're friendly enough? Do you read about it on social media, if they're frustrated enough? Or do you receive a notification directly from the server? I remember one of my first jobs at Strato, a web hosting company in Germany. When we deployed a new version of our content...
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...
