Hello, I’m Steve

Latest blog posts

• Find a git commit from the command line

   Published on 22 Mar 2023

  When I’m working in a codebase I sometimes need to find a previous commit. Until recently I would either do a git log or view the history in GitHub, but sometimes the commit might be buried under a sea of commits and be difficult to find.

• Declarative and imperative programming

   Published on 09 Mar 2023

  You may have come across the terms declarative and imperative programming, but aren’t sure what they mean. If you’ve been writing a code for a reasonable amount of time, you most likely know these concepts, you just don’t know what they’re called.

• They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does

   Published on 05 Mar 2023

  I’ve been practicing photography seriously for around ten years, and one thing I have always been told is that gear doesn’t matter. One thing I have learned in that time is that this is not an absolute. The gear doesn‘t matter, but it also does.

• Git commit messages: Why or what?

   Published on 09 May 2022

  I’ve always been told that when writing a git commit message, it should explain the why rather that the what behind the changes. The reasoning is that a reviewer can see what you have done by looking at the code, but they have no context as to why. My thoughts on this are that it should explain the what, especially if you work with pull requests.

• React lazy state initialization

   Published on 08 May 2022

  The simplest way to set the initial state of a React component is to pass a value directly to the useState hook.