Hi, I'm Jesse Skinner.
I've been building web apps that last since 2001. I offer fixed quotes with flexible scope and firm deadlines. I'm still helping clients that emailed me back in 2007.
I'd love to hear what you're working on. Feel free to email me at [email protected].
Web apps that last
When you're building a new web application, or even a new feature, how can you ensure that you're not creating a nightmare code base that will need to be rewritten completely in a few years? Some people will say it's hopeless to even try and write code that will last. I've even heard people suggest that you should aim to rewrite all your code every few years. That sounds like a...
Empower your clients to make changes
When a client asks me to make a change to a website, I have two choices. I can go and make the change. Or, I can set things up so that the client can make the change themselves. It's not always obvious which of these two will be a better use of my time. If it's a one-time change that will never need to happen again, of course it's better if I go make the change. But sometimes it's...
Chrome broke my client's web app
The great thing about the web is that web pages from thirty years ago still work fine. So you can imagine how surprised I was when a new version of Chrome broke my client's web app in production. Business as usual The web app is a data visualization tool with a colourful d3 SVG map. Hovering over a country brings up a tooltip, and clicking a country brings up a larger panel with data....
Debugging a slow web app
I got an email today from one of my clients, letting me know that one of his web apps was down. He said he was getting an error and asked me to take a look. In the end, I was able to fix it and get it running faster than ever. What caused it turned out to be a huge surprise to me. I thought I'd outline the steps I went through here, to try to help others trying to solve similar problems in...
If an error is logged in the cloud, does it make a sound?
If a user sees an error message on your web server, how do you find out? Does the user report it directly, if they're friendly enough? Do you read about it on social media, if they're frustrated enough? Or do you receive a notification directly from the server? I remember one of my first jobs at Strato, a web hosting company in Germany. When we deployed a new version of our content...
Does your web server scale down?
Are you paying for servers sitting idle in the middle of the night? When we talk about scaling a web server, we often focus on scaling up. Can your server handle a spike in traffic? As your business grows, can your database handle the growth? There's less focus on scaling down. It makes sense, because most businesses are focused on growth. Not too many are looking to shrink. But if you're...