I used to think squash commits were so cool, and then I had to use them all day, every day. Here’s why you should avoid squash — “Wow, that’s so cool!” I’ll always remember seeing my first squash commit. When I first joined a large engineering organization with more than 200 members, the squash commits were the first thing I noticed. To me, the consistent use of squash commits across the company screamed “professionalism” and “we know…

This code pattern, which is commonly used in React, is a much better idea than using traditional function parameters in JS. Here’s why. — There’s a bad practice in writing functions that I want to smash, even though it’s the way you learn to write functions when you learn programming. Let’s look at a contrived example where I’m passing in some chartData to a helper function, which then passes along parameters to another function:

This myth comes from the era of 80-column x 25-row text terminals. Here’s why you should write long commit messages — Remember when Twitter was a platform where you could only post up to 140 characters at a time — the maximum allowed in an SMS text message? Since 2017, Twitter has allowed 280 characters — about 40 to 70 words in a single message or something you can read in…

After over 4 million views on my blog, I’ve learned why some of my articles get hundreds of views from Google every day. Here’s what I’ve learned about search engine optimization (SEO). — A version of this article was presented by the author as part of Momentum 2021, a free virtual event. Here are the slides and the replay on YouTube. How do you rank #1 on Google? It’s a question that everybody seems to want to know the answer to, and with good reason. In this article, you’ll learn…

Snowflake has become a popular data warehouse because of its high-performance SQL query engine for data analytics, cloud-based architecture, easy-to-use web interface, transparent pricing model, and automatic scaling in response to demand. Here’s how Snowflake compares to other data warehouses. — Snowflake data platform offers some unique advantages over other data warehousing solutions, at least when it comes to performance and ease-of-use. Before we look at how Snowflake is different, let’s look at a simplified analytics workflow of 1) Clean, 2) Warehouse, and 3) Analyze.

Snowflake’s virtual warehouses come in a variety of different sizes, from X-Small to 6X-Large. But how many CPU nodes does each virtual machine actually have available for data analytics queries? Here’s the answer. — Snowflake data warehouse uses “virtual warehouses” (also called simply “warehouses”) as an abstraction to represent computing power. Snowflake warehouses allow you to execute data analytics queries in a performant, cost-effective manner using Snowflake’s proprietary SQL query engine. Similar to virtual machines in other data platforms, the warehouses in your Snowflake…

In Snowflake data platform, databases are virtual hard drives where you store data, while warehouses are the virtual compute resources you use to run analytical queries. Here’s what to know. — Snowflake is a data analytics platform that offers advantages over traditional databases for a variety of interesting data engineering and analytics applications. Snowflake uses databases to hold large amounts of data (“storage”) separate from the “virtual warehouses” (or just “warehouses”), which process and manipulate that data (“compute”).

There’s an important difference between the analytics terms “virtual warehouse” and “data warehouse.” Here’s what you need to know — Snowflake is a data analytics platform that has become popular because of its excellent performance when running business intelligence (BI) and other data analytics queries. The term “data warehouse” refers to any service or computing infrastructure used to store analytical data, especially one that separates storage (the data) from compute…

Need to update Yarn to the latest version in a JavaScript project? It’s easier than you think, but there are a few things you need to know before you get started, especially if upgrading to Yarn 3. — The project manager yarn has a bit of a bad reputation because of major breaking changes from “classic yarn” (v1) to “modern yarn” (v2+). Despite that, I’ve gotten comfortable with using the modern, up-to-date version of yarn in all of my projects instead of the alternative, npm.