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
Coding with LLMs can still be fun
Do you love reviewing AI-generated code? Do you get a tickle of pure joy to find and criticize the mistakes and problems in hallucinatory slop? Me neither. You know what I do love? I love pouring my creativity and insight and empathy into a project. I love designing architectures and solutions that actually make things better for users. I love getting in the flow state, cranking away at a...
Weekly Cadence
I have a weekly cadence with my clients. This means they expect me to make progress every week. But there's no expectations for any particular day. I'm also careful not to over-commit. I leave myself room to breathe. If I decide to go beyond that and work extra, everyone's happy. If I don't, that's okay too. My day is a blank canvas. I get to decide how I'll fill it. What...
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...
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...
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...
