fbf-blog · sheet 03 · all entries
11 entries
Articles on software engineering and developer tools, drawn from building streaming platforms, AI products, and web applications.
Entry 01September 27, 2026
axe reported 1 violation and 107 nodes it would not judge on my own site. The 107 were not noise and not failures; they were unmeasured. What it took to measure them, what the one real miss looked like, and the CI rule I run now.
accessibility / axe / frontend-platform / ci-cd
Entry 02September 19, 2026
At Sky the frontend team built and ran its own GraphQL BFF: response times halved at 99.9% uptime, and the failure modes were ours to fix. What ownership actually cost and what it bought.
graphql / bff / node-js / architecture
Entry 03September 12, 2026
At Sky we merged twelve European territory apps into two platforms. Notes on what we unified, what we deliberately left alone, and the parts of the job that had nothing to do with code.
frontend-platform / architecture / streaming / react
Entry 04August 9, 2026
I was inside Cambridge Analytica in March 2018. The story everyone knows names the wrong dataset. The real engine is still legal and still running.
cambridge-analytica / data / privacy / politics
Entry 05June 14, 2026
Last week npm shipped 2FA-gated publishing. Eight months too late, two years behind PyPI. The pattern is structural: npm always patches last because the registry is closed source. The fix is three tiers, automated scanning, and opening the source.
npm / supply-chain / security / open-source
Entry 06May 25, 2026
Junior hiring is down 40%. AI gave boards the rationale to keep cutting. The apprenticeship lag is 5–7 years. No juniors today means no seniors in 2031.
ai / software-engineering / hiring / engineering-management
Entry 07May 3, 2026
AI tools made developers faster on paper and slower in practice. Output is up, learning is down, debugging takes longer, and bad habits compound while managers keep raising the quota. The tools aren't the problem. Treating them like a thinking replacement is.
ai / software-engineering / developer-experience / burnout
Entry 08March 28, 2026
A simple way to manage shell secrets using Bitwarden CLI and macOS Keychain, no more plaintext exports, no more anxiety every time you open your `.zshrc`.
security / devtools / shell / open-source
Entry 09November 17, 2025
Open-source TypeScript client for Strapi CMS v5 with full type safety, CRUD + upsert operations, advanced filtering, i18n support, and minimal dependencies. Built to eliminate boilerplate in content-driven apps.
typescript / strapi / open-source / developer-tools
Entry 10September 8, 2024
‘After 250+ interviews across a decade as both interviewer and candidate, here is why LeetCode-style challenges fail to assess real-world engineering ability, and what companies should do instead.’
tech-hiring / interviews / software-engineering / career
Entry 11October 28, 2022
How we used GraphQL as a Backend for Frontends at Sky TV, consolidating 12 microservices into a single API. 99.9% uptime, 50% faster responses, and 83% less code across territories. Originally discussed on the Syntax.fm podcast.
graphql / architecture / streaming / node-js