Schembri on Software
Schembri on Software
Jamie Schembri
A freelance software engineer in the Netherlands with a focus on building value. I'm Jamie. Pleased to meet you! I'm an English/Maltese man on the wrong side of thirty, and I live in the Netherlands with my wife and three dogs. My day job is as a freelance software engineer, primarily with Ruby on Rails. I've worked with everything from tiny agencies to multi-national corporations, which has made me rather versatile.
Latest Posts
The SOLID principles are required learning for software engineers dealing with object-oriented code. Think you know them? Let's take each one apart together.
Dependencies are free chunks of functionality, except when they're not. They come with hidden costs which need careful consideration.
At first glance, depending on a library to fill a requirement is just good engineering. DRY, probably the best-known software engineering principle, tells us to avoid duplication like the plague. And what is writing your own code over...
Start writing now with a Ghost blog on PikaPods! This guide takes you through all the steps for a production-ready Ghost install, complete with newsletter support.
Introduction ℹ️I am not affiliated with any of the services mentioned in this post. With more people questioning big tech's role and impact on their lives, now is as good a time as any to reduce our reliance on traditional,...
I dislike [all] blanket statements, but complexity is never desirable. Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it’s so important that Software’s Primary Technical Imperative has to...
One person's complex is another person's simple. Budget complexity intentionally and embrace simplicity of the whole.
An annoyance I came across when running tests in my app, leading to poor visibility.
Google recently added a dialog to let users select their search engine. Ordinarily you choose your preferred search engine and get on with life, but this doesn't appear to be the case when using Chrome for automation, such as through...
Git provides a rich set of options for customising its behaviour via the .gitconfig file. I present here some of the more interesting options. For more comprehensive information on each and every option, you had better peruse the...
We use git all the time, so configuring it to work better with us is a worthwhile investment. Here are some changes I like to make.
Some useful snippets for a better time with the Eleventy framework.
I recently moved this site away from Hugo and onto Eleventy. Given my simple needs, I was attracted to Eleventy because it too is simple and flexible. Unfortunately, those very positive traits mean that developers may need to invent a...
We know that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but we can't know if it's premature without a wider context outside of the codebase.
It's not a rhetorical question. Who, and why, do people care if your app is slow? What is the purpose of the code you're writing? Whom does it impact? And where is the author going with this? Today I came across a post on social media...