This a comprehensive guide for how to containerize your Mongo/Express/React/Node (MERN) app with Docker and deploy it to Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS). I will share my research and lessons learned deploying a MERN app, including what worked, what didn’t work, how I prepared the app for deployment and accomplished the deployment.

In this article, I will show you add a rich text editor based on Draft.js to your web app. This post is part of the Web Developer Playbook series, created to provide examples, best practice, and suggestions for designing and building web services. I will be using libraries from the JavaScript ecosystem (e.g., Node.js, React.js) in all my examples.

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People have different reasons to want to quit their 9-5 to pursue entrepreneurship full time. I was drawn to the opportunity to take something from idea to product and being able to “be my own boss”. We all want the lifestyle of a successful entrepreneur but you don’t need to have your own VC funded startup to build a great product.

This post is part of the Web Developer Playbook series, which are created to provide examples, best practice, and suggestions for designing and building web services. I will be using libraries from the JavaScript ecosystem (e.g., Node.js, React.js) in all my examples.

This documents the market research I’ve completed for my startup, LooseLeaf. This is a long and exhaustive market research. There’s a TL;DR version of the value proposition.

Linked list is like an array but more flexible. Elements in an array are stored contiguously in memory while linked lists are stored as nodes with two fields: current value and a pointer to the next thing in the list. We are going to implement linked list in JavaScript and go over some algorithms with the linked list.

We are going to go over a set of coding and whiteboard problems that would be asked during a coding interview. I’m drawing these problems from LeetCode and Cracking the Coding Interview. They are a sample of the medium and hard problems that require a bit of thinking and and familiarity with some fundamental data structures in computer science.

When I work at my federal job on a close intranet network, we often had to access information from different databases and filesystems through custom or share point websites which did not have the best user interface. It was a pain point for me and many of my colleagues. I decided to make a set of single page applications (SPAs) with nicer UX for querying the databases and file systems.

Being great at coding interviews doesn’t necessarily make you a great developer and being a great developer doesn’t necessarily make you great at interviews. However, you need to pass the interview to get the job. Most tech companies, public or startups, have started drawing from the same pool of interview material, adopted the same set of coding challenges and problems for candidates to solve. Coding interviews can be challenging and stressful, but with enough practice, research, and preparation, it can be very manageable.

Go is becoming pretty mainstream. Every job posting I’ve seen recently requires Go as a want-to-have or a need-to-have skill. Here’s a guide to help you hit the ground running with Go.