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How to test a service running on a different laptop

Here’s the scenario: A coworker is working on a service and you just want to send a quick request to test it.  You want to do this without deploying the service somewhere, asking them to send the request for you (or you both want to send requests at the same time), or needing to go through the whole process of asking this coworker to push the latest to their branch, pulling it down, and setting it up on your machine.

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The art of troubleshooting

One day you’re chugging along on a problem and things are going great. You’ve harnessed the spirit of Csikszentmihalyi with incredible dexterity and before you know it, you’re waist deep in the highly sought after “flow” state. Code is just flowing from your fingers and thumbs as if they were 10 little magic wands casting spells on your keyboard. You wave at all the chumps still planning, thinking, and architecting behind you. Then all of the sudden something goes terribly wrong. The code you were pretty sure would theoretically work doesn’t actually work. Worse still, there’s no manner of sorcery nor magic wands at your keyboard, just little splatters of grease from your fingers still caked with the pizza rammed into your face about 10 lines of code ago.

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How I learned React and Redux

React is everywhere these days and growing fast. I think for this reason, many people are trying to learn how to use this framework. My journey towards learning this framework started with the many small tutorials floating around on the internet. I felt pretty confident after a few and attempted to build a bucket list app with authentication.

Holy smokes did reality knock me flat on the ground. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to implement the minimum functionality and encountered a few walls. It gradually became clear that I needed a better understanding of the fundamentals of how React and Redux worked together.

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