One For The Code

Everyone Should Maintain Legacy Code

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Nothing teaches humility quite like inheriting someone else’s decisions.

Documentation Is a Feature, Not a Chore

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Code that nobody can work out how to use is not really finished.

Docker's --init Flag Fixes Zombie Processes

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Why your containers weren’t shutting down cleanly.

Docker Volume Mounts vs Bind Mounts: When to Use Each

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Understand the difference between volume mounts and bind mounts, and how to share data between containers.

Docker Compose depends_on Doesn't Wait for Ready

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Healthchecks are required for true dependency ordering.

Docker BuildKit Secrets Don't Leak Into Images

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Pass secrets at build time without baking them into layers.

Debugging Is the Most Underrated Skill

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The skill nobody interviews for and everybody quietly relies on.

Dataview's dv.pages() vs dv.list()

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Which Dataview query to reach for, and when the other one is simpler.

CSS :has() Is Finally Here

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Parent selectors that actually work, after decades of waiting.

Creation Is Art, Debugging Is Science

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Why models are so much better at finding your bug than designing your system.

Creating Your First Laravel Package

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Pulling the code you keep copying between projects into something reusable.

Creating Type-Safe Environment Variables in TypeScript

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Catching a missing environment variable at boot rather than in production.

Creating a Daily Review Template in Obsidian

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Opening and closing the day deliberately instead of just letting it happen.

Creating a Custom ESLint Rule

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Getting the linter to enforce the thing you keep repeating in reviews.

Copilot Is Training Wheels You Should Eventually Remove

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Useful while you are learning, and worth putting down once you have.

Comments Should Explain Why, Not What

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Nobody has ever needed a comment narrating the line directly underneath it.

Code Review Is About the Team, Not the Code

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Reviews are for sharing what you know, not for scoring points on style.

Code Ownership Is an Anti-Pattern

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Why ‘my code’ is a phrase that should worry you and everyone around you.

Channel Your Drama Into Entertainment

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Drama belongs on a stage, deliberately, and not in the middle of your day.

Caddy's Automatic HTTPS Is Magic

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Certificates that renew themselves, off the back of about three lines of config.

Burnout Is Not a Badge of Honour

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Working yourself into the ground is not dedication, it is bad planning.

Building Type-Safe APIs with tRPC

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Type safety from client to server, with none of the code generation.

Building Streaming APIs with Node.js

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Moving a lot of data without your process quietly running out of memory.

Building Real-time Features with Laravel Reverb

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

First-party WebSockets in Laravel, without reaching for a third party.

Building Multi-Tenant SaaS with Laravel

Thu, 28 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

One codebase serving many customers without their data getting mixed up.

Building Custom GPTs for Your Workflow

Mon, 25 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Building a narrow assistant that knows your workflow rather than everything.

Building Custom Artisan Commands in Laravel

Thu, 21 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Moving the tedious jobs into the CLI, where they were always meant to live.

Building an Automated Weekly Review with Things 3 and Obsidian

Mon, 18 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Use Dataview queries to automatically aggregate daily notes and completed tasks into a weekly review.

Building an AI Code Review Bot

Thu, 14 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Letting a bot take the boring first pass so people review what matters.

Building a Zettelkasten in Obsidian

Mon, 11 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Small atomic notes that quietly compound into something genuinely useful.

Building a Type-Safe API Client with Zod

Thu, 07 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Validating at runtime so your compile-time types are not a comfortable lie.

Building a Robust Webhook System in Laravel

Mon, 04 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Sending events to other people’s systems and coping when they are down.

Building a RAG Pipeline with LangChain

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Getting a model to answer from your documents instead of inventing things.

Building a Plugin System in TypeScript

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Letting other people extend your code without it descending into chaos.

Building a Pi-hole + Unbound DNS Stack

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Blocking ads at the DNS level and doing your own recursion while you are there.

Building a Personal CRM with Obsidian and Dataview

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Keeping track of the people you care about without paying monthly for it.

Building a Notes MCP Server for Claude Desktop

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Give Claude direct access to your local notes folder using the Model Context Protocol.

Building a Media Server Stack: Jellyfin + *arr Apps

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Jellyfin and the *arr apps wired together so the library looks after itself.

Building a Local-First App with CRDTs

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Using Yjs so your app carries on working when the network does not.

Building a Job Queue with BullMQ

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Getting slow work off the request cycle without losing any of it.

Building a Home Dashboard with Homepage

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

One page that tells you whether everything in the house is still up.

Building a CLI Tool with Commander.js and Ink

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Terminal UIs in React with proper command parsing.

Build Momentum Before You Need It

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Momentum is easier to maintain than it ever is to create from scratch.

Always Be Refactoring

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Why the big rewrite never actually happens, and what to do instead.

AI Won't Replace Developers, But It Will Replace Developers Who Don't Use AI

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The tooling is not coming for your job, but the people using it might be.

Linux chattr Makes Files Immutable

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The one Linux command that tells even root to do one.

Reducing Katas

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 11:08:41 +0000

Practising reduce until it stops feeling like witchcraft.

Roll Your Own Component Generators

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A little trick to speed you along your development journey.

Stone Soup Programming

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:58:42 +0000

Put a rock in some water and ask if anyone fancies adding a carrot.

Shape Shifting Functions

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:24:03 +0000

Functions that change shape depending on what you hand them.

How to Make Time

Thu, 11 May 2023 09:39:36 +0000

How I actually structure a day around a big family and too many projects.

Higher-Order Functions

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:14:00 +0000

Functions that take functions, and why you already use them every day.

Call, Bind and Apply

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 09:58:29 +0000

Three ways to tell a function what ’this’ is supposed to mean.

JavaScript 101: Immediately Invoked Functions

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 10:01:40 +0000

The pattern that gave us module scope before modules turned up.

Comparison and Logical Operators in Javascript

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 09:56:54 +0000

Double equals, triple equals, and when you can trust either of them.

Javascript 101: Hoisting

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What JavaScript does with your declarations before it runs a single line.

JavaScript 101: Implicit Type Coercion

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 10:06:56 +0000

Why JavaScript quietly changes your types behind your back.

JavaScript 101: Data Types

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 10:10:51 +0000

Everything JavaScript thinks a value can be, and why that matters.

Passing By Value and Passing By Reference

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The distinction that trips everyone up at some point, explained properly.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a software engineer with a passion for building websites, apps, and scalable systems.

When I’m not coding, you can find me on the mats practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, or hanging out with my family.

I love working with:

🔭 What I’m Up To

Check out my Now page to see what I’m currently working on.

🌱 Currently Learning

📫 Find Me Here

or shoot me an email at david@oneforthecode.com.

AI and LLMs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I use these tools daily and I am neither evangelical nor dismissive about them. Mostly I am interested in where the line sits between useful and confidently wrong, and in running as much of it as possible on my own hardware.

CV

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Engineering Craft

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Fifteen years in, the things that separate a good team from a struggling one are almost never technical. These are the opinions I have arrived at, including the ones I am least sure about.

Homelab and Self-Hosting

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My homelab has been running and evolving since 2023, managed with Ansible and Terraform rather than by hand. It is the best learning environment I have ever had, because when it breaks nobody is paging me but me.

Learning

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These are the books I return to and the courses I have worked through rather than bookmarked. When I mentor someone I hand them a subset of this, in roughly this order.

Books

Book	Author	Why it is here
The Pragmatic Programmer	Hunt and Thomas	The one I give people earliest. Very little of it is about code, which is the point: it is about the habits that decide whether what you write survives contact with a team.
Code Complete, second edition	McConnell	Long, and worth it. It answers “why is this function hard to read” with something better than taste.
Design Patterns	Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides	The Gang of Four. Dated in its examples and still the shared vocabulary: when I argued for the builder pattern over a procedural mess, this was the argument.
Clean Code	Martin	Worth reading and worth arguing with, which is most of its value. Some of it I follow to the letter, some I have watched teams apply as dogma until the code got worse.
Refactoring	Fowler	Gives the moves names, so a code review stops being an argument about preference and becomes two people agreeing which transformation applies.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs	Abelson and Sussman	Genuinely hard, and anyone who says otherwise has skimmed it. It keeps asking you to build the thing you have been taking for granted, then asks what that means. I still do not understand half of it.

Courses

Course	By	Why it is here
Learn Python the Hard Way	Zed Shaw	The title is the method: type it out, break it, fix it. Unfashionable now, and still how I pick up a language I have no commercial reason to know yet.
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial	Michael Hartl	Taken while at an agency that was passing database files around by hand. I came back on the Monday and introduced migrations, which is the most direct line I can draw from a course to something I changed at work.
Laracasts	Jeffrey Way	Years of it. The best explanation of Laravel and of PHP as it is actually written now rather than as its reputation suggests, and the reason the PHP on my CV is not stuck in 2013.
Frontend Masters	Various	Where I go for depth rather than a tutorial. The courses are taught by the people who build the things.
Stephen Grider’s catalogue	Stephen Grider	Most of it, over the years. Good at the thing that is hardest to teach: building the whole thing rather than the interesting part of it.
Teach Yourself CS	Ozan Onay and Myles Byrne	A curriculum rather than a course, and I am still working through it. It exists because a lot of us came in by building things first and filled in the fundamentals afterwards. That is my route exactly.

Why this page exists

Most of my career has been spent arriving somewhere that already has a problem. What travels between those engagements is not a framework, it is the set of ideas above. A CV lists what I have used. This is closer to how I decide.

Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

🧘 Still trying to learn how to meditate with Calm
👨‍🏫 Mentoring and sharing my expertise in software engineering. Check out my profile on Upwork for more details!
🥋 Working on my Purple Belt @ SBG Crewe
💼 Working on fintech features for my clients @ Built By Up
🦀 Learning Rust via some hands-on algorithms
📱 Still building some apps in Swift and Firebase that may (or may not!) make my life a little easier.
🏃‍♂️ Working towards the someday goal of an Ironman, by training for a marathon first
🕹️ Playing stuff on the games list
🎵 Listening to these tunes

Obsidian and Productivity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Everything here runs on markdown files I own. Obsidian happens to be a nice window onto them, but the point is that the notes outlive whichever app I am using this year.

PHP and Laravel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

PHP has been quietly excellent for years and Laravel is the reason a lot of small teams ship at all. These are the things I keep reaching for on Laravel engagements.

TypeScript and JavaScript

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most of my contract work is Node and TypeScript, so this is the pile that grew fastest. It runs from the fundamentals that trip everyone up at some point through to the type-level tricks I actually reach for on client work.