How to replace useState with useRef and be a winner

My name is Vladimir, and I'm an engineering manager of a team building a banking app. Following the success of our core banking product, we've decided to expand to other financial services. In the last four months my team has grown 4x, going from a 4-person team to 4 teams totalling 15 people. It was, frankly, a shitshow, and now I see many...

It's been almost 2 years since I moved to a team lead role, then to a full-time engineering management position after the expansion of our team. I've been a front-end developer for 7 years before that, and initially I took the "advanced individual contributor" career track before doing the management turnaround. How's it been? Bumpy, but fun. In...

Aspiring developers often ask me what's the best programming language to learn. Personally, I mostly work with JS — solid choice, but everyone and their dog learns JS these days, so it might be time to add some diversity. I'm curious — which single programming language covers the most bases for you, and gives you most career opportunities for...

It's hard to believe, but, starting mid-october 2023 I conducted 60 technical interviews and hired 10 people into our team. It's been extremely tiring: around 80 hours of active interviewing, plus writing interview reports, plus screening CVs and take-home assignments, plus onboarding new members — all while doing my normal work stuff. Still, I...

I've been working with svelte exclusively for a year now, but I still manage to shoot myself in the foot every now and then when using reactive state. Some of the confusion is due to my prior experience with React, but some points are confusing on their own. Today, I dive into svelte internals to understand what's really going on. When you mutate...