Dennis Dang

October 16, 2024

Letter to developers writing React: PLEASE create custom hooks to encapsulate your logic.

Audience: developers that write React.js code. If you have a large page component with many useState, useEffect, useWhatever, please remember you can create custom hooks that calls your individual hooks. This is a component with poor encapsulation. All the innards (hooks) are spilled out onto the same local area. ``` function MyPage() ...
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October 16, 2024

Finny October Update

I've been working on and off on Finny. I think I've already spent enough time overall though and have failed to deliver a working product in its current state. So I'm going to rip out the Plaid integration and build directly on YNAB's API. I've been a user of YNAB for the past half decade. This will circumvent my largest issue. This wa...
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July 29, 2024

Finny Week 3 Update

It's the end of week 3 now. I'll admit that I had too much fun socializing this week with friends and enjoying my very flexible schedule. Some highlights: I watched my girlfriend's dance show Ain't Done Bad for the 4th time, played some video games for the first time in a long while to catch up with friends, and met up with some fellow...
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July 17, 2024

Finny Week 2 Update

It's already week 2 day 2! Time flies. I've now handled more important webhooks from Plaid. All webhooks are now tossed into the LavinMQ queue I've recently setup. Especially important is the `SYNC_UPDATES_AVAILABLE` webhook that all Plaid apps should listen to. On initial successful item creation (a connection to an institution), we'l...
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July 13, 2024

Language-agnostic background job systems where?!

There is no language-agnostic distributed background job system that’s easy to use. Please, someone build it! The existing products out there that are pretty great: 1. Celery (python) 2. Sidekiq (Ruby) 3. Jobrunr (Java) 4. Quartz (Java) 5. Forget what the C# options are 6. Oban (elixir) 7. Bullmq (nodejs) 8. Faktory (agnostic) but poor...
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July 11, 2024

NYS Self-Employment Assistance Program (SEAP), entrepreneurship without venture capital

On my way to applying for unemployment assistance, I discovered that the New York State Department of Labor provides an assistance program for those aiming to start their own business called Self-Employment Assistance Program. SEAP can offer up to 26 weeks of assistance without my need to look for new work. The maximum weekly benefit i...
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July 9, 2024

Finny First Steps

I embark on a journey to build a financial planning app that’ll actually nudge me the right ways. The key nudge is seeing the time remaining in real-time from fulfilling my goals, primarily retirement and all the little things in life. If I spend or save more, it’ll change my timeline. So far, I have a Flutter app and Scala web server....
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March 1, 2024

When will I ever be proficient in OCaml over Typescript?

I wanted to build all my new projects in OCaml. It’d be a welcomed change from the world of Typescript and Python. I’ve been a novice hanging around the OCaml community for the past few years. The discussions around algebraic effects and promising language features appeal to me. I eagerly daydream that this is the language and ecosyste...
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November 28, 2022

5 statically typed functional languages with a possible future

Learn some new concepts in the world of computer science and programming languages by trying these 5 below that’ll take you through algebraic effects, web assembly, pure functional programming (not Haskell), type safety in an actor’s world. OCaml 5.0 Have you ever heard of algebraic effects? Algebraic effects is a researched but yet-to...
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May 24, 2021

Interesting software tech of the weekend

A list of interesting technologies, frameworks, languages I come upon over the weekend Encore.dev Frameworks backed by a business appeal to me because it means that the open source project may have a chance to live long and healthily and have the money to innovate. If you are looking for a full go framework, this may be a good choice. ...
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March 16, 2021

Don’t lose sleep on your tech stack. It doesn’t matter.

TLDR; The tool a startup needs to help it survive its early stages is a single, all-encompassing one that gets the job done without overhead. Maybe because I’m still early in years as a dev, maybe my priorities are wrong, or maybe I’m just me, but I lay awake agonizing on what my future ideal tech stack should be. The tech stack that p...
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March 5, 2021

I fell for a crypto Stellar email phish

No I did not lose money. But I still opened the damn email. I wonder how many others would fall for this. Fortunately I have no stake in this blockchain, and opened the email out of curiosity. Am I more cat than rational human? What is hilarious is the string of obvious signs that I still chose to completely miss. The email. Lying to m...
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