Kahlil Lechelt

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March 1, 2022 • 4 min read

Run your day, don’t let the day run you

When I transitioned from software engineering to engineering management I had a difficult time adjusting to the new job. As an engineer, I let the day run me. I did not proactively plan my day or my week. I worked on my sprint tasks when I had no meetings and joined meetings when I had to.

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July 15, 2020 • 5 min read

Volta

Three large thunderbolts hitting the sea. They have a lot of volts.
Use Volta to stabilize your team's JavaScript tooling // Photo by Forrest Moreland on Unsplash

This post is about Volta and why it should be the first thing you should install on your machine as a JavaScript developer. The Getting Started guide describes Volta like this:

Volta is a hassle-free way to manage your JavaScript command-line tools.

and

Volta solves the problem of global packages

and it’s

Managing your [JavaScript] toolchain

The first time I landed on the page I had problems really understanding what the Volta’s value was just by reading the descriptions. Somewhere in the docs they are talking about the JavaScript toolchain™. I never used that term before. What does it mean?

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January 23, 2020 • 2 min read

New job, who dis?! - Engineering Manager edition

Last year my manager quit. I was offered his position and since December or so, I am an engineering manager. It is strange to move from a well-defined role into such a hazily-defined one. A few things have changed. I don’t code anymore at work and the relationship to my team has changed.

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July 8, 2019 • 2 min read

Build a Slack slash command app with Zeit’s Now

First of all: Now is so flipping great it’s not even funny. Basically it is this: You write your app, type now and it’s deployed. You get back the URL under which it is deployed and that’s that. Every other deployment results in a new deployment under a new URL.

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June 7, 2019 • 2 min read

I was at ReactEurope and now I "get" React Hooks

Last week, I went to Paris to spend some time there with my family and to attend ReactEurope. Based on the kind of mediocre design of their website I did not expect a lot of care to go into the organization of the conference. I expected a dull conference room in a hotel and some interesting talks.

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May 7, 2019 • 2 min read

Announcing Grit: a Markdown editor for blogging with a static site generator

Last year I decided to write more. I thought I’d try a hosted solution because I wanted to concentrate on the writing and not on the fiddling with the site. Micro.blog was the most attractive solution to me but after using it for a while I realized that, as a developer, I am not capable of leaving the building of my blog to somebody else.

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April 2, 2019 • 1 min read

Get off of Medium and publish a blog under your own domain

Nobody can wall that off behind a paywall. Nobody can put a popup over your stuff and say “Don’t look at the content right now. It’s so much better if you login!”. Nobody can build their brand off of your work. Nobody can make money off of your work, if you don’t want to.

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March 8, 2019 • 1 min read

Constraints Are Decisions You Don't Have to Make

Since I realized that constraints can produce more creative outcomes I‘ve been fascinated by it. I think I first learned about it when the iPhone became popular and the form factor and usage patterns produced beautifully designed apps and then website and web app designs that were optimized for mobile.

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March 1, 2019 • 2 min read

The Ultimate Recipe to Attract an Audience on the Internet

My awesome co-worker Emma Wedekind wrote this post about how she got 27K followers on Twitter. It’s a great post with lots of good advice to grow high quality followers. I was able to watch the whole ride and it was quite something. There is one thing I noticed about how she used Twitter that I think had significant influence in why she blew up.

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February 21, 2019 • 3 min read

TFW You Realize What Technical Debt Actually Means

A few weeks ago I set out to write a blog post about technical debt and the complexities of getting rid of it, or some of it, when you work for a company. I wanted to see what others had written about it and of course I landed on Martin Fowler’s article about technical debt.

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February 6, 2019 • 1 min read

Nested Loops Bow-Out

As you may know, I am a member of the JavaScript band Nested Loops. We performed on the last three opening performces of JSConf.eu. We will not be performing at JSConf.eu this year. It was a great honor and privilege for us to be able to do that and we are thankful for the opportunity.

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January 22, 2019 • 1 min read

How to Use Async Functions

This article by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer was exactly what I needed to wrap my head around how to use async functions without confusion. Because I was just using them intuitively so far and because of their synchronous style I got confused about when to try-catch. I also attempted to call an async function without await in front of it while using await in its body, fully expecting it will be executed synchronously.

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January 18, 2019 • 2 min read

blog-cli: A CLI for Blogging with Static Site Generators

My blog is built with Hugo. Every blog I ever had was built with a static site generator or a file based CMS. I love static site generators, they make content management simple, they are secure and it’s fun to build websites with them. For me, they have one problem: creating a blog post is annoying.

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January 17, 2019 • 1 min read

Blogging is Back

I’m excited about blogs this year. It really feels like blogs and RSS feeds are back. I am especially happy to see some developers getting serious about it. Dan Abramov started the year off with a barrage of really good posts of which some already went viral. People even started to translate them into different languages.

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January 16, 2019

Just a few days ago I stumbled over remove.bg. You can upload any picture with a face on it and it will give you back the same picture with the background removed and made transparent. It’s quite astonishing. How do they do this?!

© 2022 Kahlil Lechelt • Archive