Tyler Hawkins

CORE

Staff Software Engineer at Webflow

Joined Apr 2020

http://tylerhawkins.info/

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Reputation:	2031
Pageviews:	446.6K
Articles:	34
Comments:	6

Articles
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Articles

Productivity and Organization Tips for Software Engineers

Learning strategies like the 3-3-3 method, time blocking, achieving flow state, and eating the frog can help you have a more productive day.

February 4, 2025

· 4,926 Views · 6 Likes

Heroku for ChatOps: Start and Monitor Deployments From Slack

Learn how to start and monitor Heroku app deployments all from Slack — no need to context switch or move between multiple apps.

June 6, 2024

· 3,193 Views · 2 Likes

Going with the Flow for CI/CD: Heroku Flow With Gitflow

This article walks you through how to set up Heroku Flow for CI/CD using a dev and main branch and a staging and production app.

May 8, 2024

· 1,398 Views · 2 Likes

How I Finally Got All My CI/CD in One Place: Getting My CI/CD Act Together With Heroku Flow

If you want to go all in on Heroku, you can use a series of solutions called Heroku Flow to configure all your CI/CD without any third parties.

May 1, 2024

· 2,857 Views · 2 Likes

Deploying Heroku Apps To Staging and Production Environments With GitLab CI/CD

Today we'll learn how to automatically deploy your app to the correct environment any time code is merged into your dev or main branches.

March 25, 2024

· 3,993 Views · 2 Likes

Deploying to Heroku With GitLab CI/CD

In this article, learn how you can deploy your Heroku app automatically any time code is merged into your main branch by using GitLab CI/CD.

March 21, 2024

· 10,924 Views · 2 Likes

Unblock Your Software Engineers With Unblocked

AI is playing an ever-increasing role in our field as developers with the capacity to significantly increase our productivity in ways we’ve never seen before.

November 27, 2023

· 3,502 Views · 2 Likes

Build Quicker With Zipper: Building a Ping Pong Ranking App Using TypeScript Functions

You don’t have to spend time agonizing over your app’s infrastructure when you have a simple idea. Just get out there, start building, and deploy!

September 25, 2023

· 4,173 Views · 4 Likes

Using Render Log Streams to Log to Papertrail

We’ll look at how we can configure an app that is hosted on Render to send its system logs to Papertrail by using Render Log Streams.

June 1, 2023

· 5,638 Views · 1 Like

Hacking the Hackathon

Developers love to hack, but software engineering as a profession can actually be quite mundane. A hackathon can help remind you why you love programming.

February 3, 2023

· 4,846 Views · 2 Likes

Create Dynamic Code Review Checklists With CodeSee Code Automation

Wouldn’t it be nice if your pull request checklists could be dynamic and only show relevant reminders? See best practices and share knowledge effortlessly.

December 5, 2022

· 3,480 Views · 1 Like

Three Ways To Scale Your Apps With Render

When your app is experiencing high traffic or utilization, you need to scale your service to handle that load. Learn more about scaling your app with Render.

October 25, 2022

· 5,019 Views · 2 Likes

Tools and Integrations to Significantly Improve Code Review in GitHub

In this article, we’ll consider five tools and integrations that can significantly improve your code review experience in GitHub.

August 8, 2022

· 4,128 Views · 2 Likes

The Essential Web3 Tools and Technologies Developers Must Know

Explore Web3, why it matters, and how it differs from Web2. Look at the tech stack that aspiring Web3 developers should become familiar with to get started.

August 2, 2022

· 6,397 Views · 4 Likes

How to Build a Crowdfunding Web3 Dapp – Let's Buy Twitter!

We’ll consider how crowdfunding apps normally work, how they would work in the Web3 world, and how we could build our own crowdfunding Web3 decentralized app (“dapp”). We’ll even include some code samples to help you build your own decentralized crowdfunding platform.

July 18, 2022

· 4,199 Views · 1 Like

7 Ways to Dramatically Reduce Your Time in Code Review

Code reviews can be painful. Explore 7 best practices to make the code review process a better experience for both the code author and the code reviewer.

July 12, 2022

· 7,704 Views · 7 Likes

Using Insomnia to Upgrade Dependencies — With Confidence

When you have a good test suite running against your codebase, you can upgrade your dependencies with confidence.

July 6, 2022

· 5,896 Views · 1 Like

Easily Format Markdown Files in VS Code

This VS Code extension helps you when writing markdown to format your text, create lists, and create and modify tables with ease.

June 13, 2022

· 5,193 Views · 1 Like

How I Built My Own Insomnia Plugin

Insomnia helps with building, testing, and debugging APIs. Plugins extend functionality. Build your own and add new functionality with just a few lines of code!

June 9, 2022

· 5,986 Views · 1 Like

How To Create PR Review Apps With Render

By making it simple to visually review changes, PR review apps make it more likely that code reviewers will actually do so.

Updated May 17, 2022

· 2,560 Views · 1 Like

Handle Sensitive Data Securely With Skyflow

Learn some benefits of outsourcing your data privacy needs so that you can focus on your company’s core products while still remaining secure and compliant.

Updated April 29, 2022

· 6,321 Views · 6 Likes

Automated Accessibility Testing

Static analysis checkers, browser extensions, ESLint plugins, CI tools, unit tests, and more. Let's take a look at some of the automated tools we have available.

April 6, 2022

· 3,743 Views · 2 Likes

The Principle Behind the Practice

A principle is a universal truth that is applicable everywhere. A practice is a specific implementation of a principle and can vary based on the situation. Understanding why we do the things we do is the key to avoiding cargo cult programming.

February 7, 2022

· 4,473 Views · 2 Likes

Build an SMS App with Infobip

SMS is a powerful way to connect with your users. Let's build a “Fun Fact of the Day” web app using the SMS API from Infobip, a cloud communications platform.

January 27, 2022

· 6,856 Views · 3 Likes

Lessons From a Tech Lead

Roles, responsibilities, and words of advice on time management, delegation, process improvement, decision making, and giving feedback.

January 24, 2022

· 7,016 Views · 14 Likes

Backend Engineering Skills Are Emphasized Too Heavily for Principal Engineers

Experience with design systems, accessibility, usability, and frontend performance are skills that are often overlooked.

January 17, 2022

· 5,644 Views · 4 Likes

Death to Tribal Knowledge

Ridding your company of tribal knowledge is difficult in practice, but it can be done in three simple steps. First, document the information. Second, make sure people know where to find it. Third, make sure the documentation stays up to date.

January 4, 2022

· 11,296 Views · 11 Likes

Build a Plagiarism Checker Using Machine Learning

Using machine learning, we can build our own plagiarism checker that searches a vast database for stolen content. In this article, we’ll do exactly that.

October 6, 2021

· 12,281 Views · 4 Likes

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

If you're playing a loser's game, a winning strategy is to simply try to avoid making mistakes and let your opponent beat himself.

September 20, 2021

· 43,663 Views · 50 Likes

Software Engineers Need to Know DevOps Too, and That Starts with CI/CD

In this world of cross-functional teams and microservice architecture, DevOps skills become increasingly important. Learn about continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and more.

June 24, 2021

· 12,025 Views · 6 Likes

Comments

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

Sep 22, 2021 · Tyler Hawkins

Another great analogy! This is somewhat of a tangent, but you might be interested in this paper from some researchers in 1980. It's titled "A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition": https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA084551.pdf

In it they talk a lot about how expertise is gained and how your experience is first applied consciously and then becomes subconscious over time. They reference chess a lot and what distinguishes a great chess player from an average one.

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

Sep 22, 2021 · Tyler Hawkins

Thank you Marco!

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

Sep 22, 2021 · Tyler Hawkins

Hard disagree! Let's let computers do the things that they're good at and let humans do the things that we're good at. Linters, formatters, git hooks, and CI pipelines are incredibly beneficial, not a crutch to be avoided.

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

Sep 20, 2021 · Tyler Hawkins

Thanks Jasper!

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

Sep 20, 2021 · Tyler Hawkins

Thank you Thomas!

Software Engineering is a Loser’s Game

Sep 20, 2021 · Tyler Hawkins

Thank you Dmitry! That's very kind of you.