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
From Full-Time to Freelance: How I made the leap
I was already dreaming of starting my own business before I ever got my first job. My very first job was at a movie theatre in the late twentieth century. In my breaks I would brainstorm ideas for starting a web design business. I would fantasize about proposing to redesign the movie theatre's website. When the boss wasn't looking, I would sketch out my web site and my pricing on scraps...
Dear Recruiter: I am not interested in a full-time job
Dear Recruiter, Thank you for contacting me, but unfortunately I am not interested in a full-time job. There is no way in hell you'll find me in an office nine-to-five Monday-to-Friday. I've been there, done that, and it was a living nightmare. No, you don't need to circle back in three months to see if my situation has changed. I'm not available for employment, and I never will...
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...
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...
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...
