I have previously shared stories about the workshops I attended on my blog, but I feel compelled to introduce and "brag" about them once again — that these workshops are completely free, just one of the dozens of amazing perks my company, Netcompany, provides for its employees. Truly a wonderful and inspiring company culture.

From my perspective, a good idea only truly “becomes” something when it is packaged as a complete product — something that can stand on its own, be used, and delivered to others. That’s why I built StarK — a mobile app to help groups of people split expenses and manage shared spending together. Today, StarK is officially live on the App Store, with Google Play currently in Closed Beta.

It's been a long time since I last joined a workshop, for a few reasons, but mostly because from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, there were few indoor events :)) (plenty of outdoor ones though hahaaa) Actually, there were a few at the beginning of this year but I couldn't sign up in time, and company events are always super super hot because every single one is top quality... praising it repeatedly feels redundant but it is what it is. The proof is that after going out and having fun, I even got some spoils of war: workshop products and souvenir photos... Enough talking.. let's get into it.

Homo sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago. Not until around 10,000 BCE did humans enter the agricultural era: knowing how to cultivate, breed livestock, settle down, and begin building stable communities.

Sometimes I start with something that sounds tiny, and somehow it turns into a whole renovation. This time, it was Thucde.dev.

If you only glance at the homepage or a couple of dashboard screens, the easy reaction is probably: “ Looks like some nice UI polish. ” One of the biggest shifts is that the frontend no longer feels like a codebase living between two eras. Over just a few days, thucde.dev went through a pretty substantial set of changes:

There’s a subtle React bug many developers run into without realizing why. Looks completely harmless.

I avoided using GitHub Actions to deploy Node.js apps to Azure for years. Why? Because I simply couldn't get them to work. I would see "Build Succeeded" and "Deployment Successful" messages, yet the actual application would crash immediately upon launch. Today, I faced the same issue again. However, this time I had my AI companion to help debug. After several prompts and failed attempts, I finally found the root cause and a permanent fix. I’m sharing it here to save you the headache.

Array.prototype.reverse() mutates the original array. That’s fine in isolated scripts, but inside a React render it can lead to surprising UI, especially in React 18 Strict Mode (development) where React intentionally invokes render twice to surface side effects. Consider a parent passing an array as props:

I recently ran into an issue with MongoDB query that I took ~30 mins to figuring out - so I am sharing in case you are facing this at a time - because I didn't notice this, had this issue before even though I have been using MongoDB for a long time. --

As a software engineer in web development, how usually have you been using Postman for testing API endpoints? In my case, I use it sometimes, but Postman is a very strong tool to play with the APIs.  So, do you use secured endpoints that require some sort of authorization? How do you do on that?

Typing repetitive terminal commands multiple times a day slows down your workflow. Setting up shell aliases allows you to turn lengthy commands like pnpm run dev or terraform init into quick 2-letter shortcuts like pn dev or tf init . On macOS (default shell is Zsh) and Linux (Bash), aliases are stored in your user profile configuration file.

You’ve Probably Seen Dynamic Images—You Just Didn’t Know It You might have come across dynamic images before without realizing that’s what they were.

If you've used the @googlemaps/places Node.js client library recently, you may have noticed it’s not keeping up with the latest Google Places API features—particularly the Text Search endpoint. While it’s convenient to rely on official libraries, sometimes they lag behind the actual REST API (Web Service). That’s exactly what happened to me. Rather than wait for updates or work around limitations, I decided to go straight to the source: the REST API  (Web Service) itself. In this post, I’ll show you how to build a TypeScript class that makes direct HTTP requests to the Google Places Text Search endpoint. By using REST, we get full access to the latest features, more control over the requests and responses, and a better understanding of how the API really works.

While working on a feature that caches image data for the user's last searches, I ran into a limitation: localStorage caps out at around 5MB (and only stores strings). Not ideal when you're dealing with images or structured data. That’s when I turned to IndexedDB — the browser’s built-in, asynchronous, low-level NoSQL database.

While I'm doing an extremely boring task, is not too complicated, but it repetitive and I have to do the same thing for many many of times. It took me a day to get half the work done. And it's... even prone to error . I'm implementing a feature that would change the whole Help page of an application. It is estimated (by me) to have almost 6 mds (man-days) for all the changes needed. 

In this short blog, you'll know how to use debounce lodash in React or Next.js applications. When handling user input in React, especially in scenarios like search bars or real-time form validation, it's common to run a function every time the user types. However, this can lead to excessive function executions, causing performance issues and unnecessary re-renders.

Let's say, you're implementing a feature that functions based on the browser's storage, such as local storage  or session storage . You manipulate the storage programmatically based on the feature's events and use that data in the storage to do something. However, you might run into an issue which you're not getting the correct storage data - in other words - you're getting outdated information. 

Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to format plain text. It was created by John Gruber in 2004 with the goal of making it easy for writers to create web content that is both human-readable in its raw form and easily converted into HTML. ChatGPT -  "what is markdown"

If you're really into Unsplash community, like photography and have something to do with React/Next.js, you may, sometimes, wish to have Unsplash photos integrated into your products/applications. Unsplash Developers API got your back! And it's FREE. 

Have you ever been thinking about how to publish a React Component to a registry such as NPM so that it can be installed and used by several projects but don't know how? I feel you, there were several attempts that I've been through this, but there was no luck. I was able to publish a component to NPM, but the component is not working properly.

While developing a new cool application, I figured out how to deal with BlurHash strings. If you have heard about this before, you may notice that passing the BlurHash string won't help with your image loadings. See below: In this example, we fetch the image data from Unsplash, with then Unsplash returns an object with images (including a blur_hash string for each), this app then decodes those blur_hash strings into image data (in base64 format), then shows them immediately in prior to the real image that still being loaded.

If React Strict Mode in development gets you into trouble in some cases, for example, you need a specific action to run only just once, but also don't want to lose the benefits of running the app in Strict Mode, I'll show you a way out! First, you may need to check whether the environment your app is running on, like so:

Let's fix the Husky Git pre-commit hook failures on GitHub Desktop on Windows! First, if you are facing the same issue as mine, please try the following steps:

Have you ever faced an issue that your webpage fails to finish a request due to backend crashing or it's too long to respond, and the app just waits for it - which seems to take forever.  In JavaScript, from ES6 and later*, there is a built-in method that we can use to implement the timeout feature very easily, called Promise.race . Let me show you how.

Normalization is the process of converting a database design into a standard format. The conversion is done into a normal form - which is the standard of designing a database. Designing database following the normalization could help with some benefits:

A short photo note from the company New Year Update 2024 — less of a dump, more of a day I wanted to keep. We had the quarterly update at New World Saigon Hotel. Second time there that year. Looking back on progress, new initiatives, and what was coming next felt genuinely energizing.

First impressions matter, especially online . For websites showcasing stunning visuals, ensuring lightning-fast image loading is paramount. Slow loading times can leave a lasting negative impact on potential visitors, driving them away before they even experience your content. While techniques like lazy loading, CDNs, edge servers, caching, and precise image sizing are crucial, there's another often-overlooked factor: image format .

Have you ever faced the situation that even using git mv -force doesn't work. Or have you ever decided to rename a file or a folder just by changing letter's case and ran into an issue that git doesn't detect changes, or has two versions of the same changes, one for old name, one for new?  If those cases don't work for you, maybe this blog would help, at least one more try.