Hi, I'm Jesse Skinner.
I'm a web development coach focused on reducing developer burnout.
I work with web development teams to reduce stress through automated testing and deployment, scalable infrastructure, and the modernization of painful legacy systems.
Through customized training and coaching, I empower teams to adopt new technologies to improve their workflows and make work more enjoyable.
If your team is stressed out, feel free to email me. I'm eager to hear about your challenges and see how I can make your life easier.
Articles
You don't need permission
You don't need permission to write the highest quality code you can. You don't need permission to design a reliable server architecture that won't crash. You don't need permission to develop a suite of tests to ensure bugs are caught early. You don't need permission to upgrade your dependencies, to ensure your system stays secure and modern. Your boss, manager or client will...
Web apps that last
When you're building a new web application, or even a new feature, how can you ensure that you're not creating a nightmare code base that will need to be rewritten completely in a few years? Some people will say it's hopeless to even try and write code that will last. I've even heard people suggest that you should aim to rewrite all your code every few years. That sounds like a...
Debugging a slow web app
I got an email today from one of my clients, letting me know that one of his web apps was down. He said he was getting an error and asked me to take a look. In the end, I was able to fix it and get it running faster than ever. What caused it turned out to be a huge surprise to me. I thought I'd outline the steps I went through here, to try to help others trying to solve similar problems in...
Trying to decide what to do next? Follow the light.
Happy New Year! I've been trying to come up with a New Year's resolution, and it got me thinking about setting goals, finding and following your purpose, and how this ties into some books I read this year. TL;DR: If you're trying to decide what to do next in your life, in which direction you should expand and grow, maybe it helps to think like a tree and go where the sunshine is. The...
Coding with ChatGPT
I started using ChatGPT when it came out a few months ago. It was mind blowing to chat with a computer and have it feel almost like a real person. Some people are talking about how it's going to replace all sorts of jobs, including software developers. I'm not sure about that. But I have found some ways that it can definitely make our jobs easier, if we understand how it works and use it...
How I use GitHub Copilot to be more productive
GitHub Copilot is a VS Code extension that brings machine learning into your development environment. It will upload snippets of your code to Microsoft's servers, and send back a list of suggestions of what it predicts will come next. Some people have wondered whether our jobs as developers are doomed, now that machine learning can write code for us. Will computers be able to write all the...
