Hi, I'm Jesse Skinner.
I've been building web apps that last since 2001. I offer fixed quotes with flexible scope and firm deadlines. I'm still helping clients that emailed me back in 2007.
I'd love to hear what you're working on. Feel free to email me at [email protected].
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...