Monthly Archives: February 2026

Why maintaining a codebase is so damn hard – with OhMyZSH creator Robby Russell [Podcast #207]

Today Quincy Larson interviews Robby Russell. Robby created the open-source project Oh My ZSH. Oh My Zsh is a framework for managing your Zsh configuration for your command line terminal. It’s been extremely popular among developers for more than a decade. Robby is also the CEO of Planet Argon, a software consultancy he created two […]

How to Build a Custom PDF Text Extractor with Node.js and TypeScript

Extracting text from PDFs sounds simple until you try to do it. And it can be even more challenging for JavaScript developers, with various libraries to choose from and so on. I encountered this problem while I was building my SaaS app. I scoured through StackOverflow, Reddit, and Quora, but didn’t find a satisfying answer. […]

The Modern React Data Fetching Handbook: Suspense, use(), and ErrorBoundary Explained

Most React developers don’t break the data fetching process all at once. It usually degrades gradually, slowly. Traditionally, you may have used a useEffect here, a loading flag there, and an error state along with it to tackle data fetching. Moving forward, another fetch depended on the first one, then a second useEffect, and another […]

Build a Production-Ready Pipeline with Docker, CI/CD & Hostinger

Learn to take a full-stack React, Go, and MongoDB application from local development to a fully containerized production environment. We just posted a full course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will help you master Docker orchestration, learn to manage environments with Docker Compose, and deploy live to Hostinger using both manual and automated methods. […]

How to Dockerize Your Application and Deploy It

A step-by-step guide to containerising a FastAPI application with Docker and deploying it to the cloud for consistent, production-ready delivery. Modern applications rarely live in isolation. They move between laptops, staging servers, and production environments. Each environment has its own quirks, missing libraries, or slightly different configurations. This is where many “works on my machine” […]

How to Optimize PySpark Jobs: Real-World Scenarios for Understanding Logical Plans

In the world of big data, performance isn’t just about bigger clusters – it’s about smarter code. Spark is deceptively simple to write but notoriously difficult to optimize, because what you write isn’t what Spark executes. Between your transformations and actual computation lies an invisible translation layer – the logical plan – that determines whether […]

How to Build a Production-Ready Feature Flag System with Next.js and Supabase

Feature flags are powerful tools that let you control which features are visible to users without deploying new code. They enable gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and instant feature toggles, which are all essential for modern software development. In this article, we’ll build a real, production-ready feature flag system, not just a simple boolean toggle. Specifically, […]

Why Your UI Won’t Update: Debugging Stale Data and Caching in React Apps

Your UI doesn’t “randomly” refuse to update. In most cases, it’s rendering cached data, which is data that was saved somewhere so the app doesn’t have to do the same work again. Caching is great for performance, but it becomes a pain when you don’t realize which layer is reusing old data. If you’ve ever […]