Last week, I was approached by a friend regarding a freelance job she’d been offered. She wanted to know the benefits of freelancing and whether it was an opportunity worth pursuing. She isn’t the first person to approach me; many people wonder why I freelance. There are so many developer jobs out there, so why would one choose to go it alone?

We’ll get to the answers shortly, but first a little background. I work as a full-stack freelance engineer, as well as being a founder of Skilled, a service that provides high-quality freelance opportunities to top Israeli developers. …

There are a lot of simple tricks that can massively speed you up as a developer and save a lot of keystrokes.

Here are a few hidden gems that many programmers I meet aren’t aware of. Many are aimed at beginners but a few of these will help experienced developers too. If there are any you’d think should be added to the list please leave a comment, I would love to learn more!

git push

You don’t need to write git push origin branch_name each time. You can get git push to do the same thing for you automatically.

To get this working, run the following command in your…

Our team recently won the Olim in Tech Hackathon. Twenty-five teams entered and over 100 people participated. This article discusses what we learnt from it. The second half is more technical, so if that’s what interests you feel free to skip the first few sections.

Despite the bold title, this isn’t the definitive guide to winning a hackathon, I’m just hoping to get some good SEO as that’s the term I looked up before the event myself. I’m no hackathon expert. Learn from what you think makes sense and discard the rest 😀.

My situation is somewhat unique in that I’ve also organised a hackathon at which I was also one of the judges. I’ll also be sharing experiences from that event and what I took from it leading into this one. …

A short collection of quotes by highly successful people on failure and its celebration.

Marc Andreesen

“I’m old-fashioned. Where I come from, people like to succeed… When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn’t have the word ‘pivot.’ We didn’t have a fancy word for it. We just called it a fuck-up…

We do see companies, that literally every time we meet them, they’ve pivoted. Every time they’re off to something new, and it’s like watching a rabbit go through a maze or something.They’re never going to converge on anything because they’re never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right.” …

I work as part of a team of freelancers and the typical projects we do use React/React Native, NodeJS, GraphQL. This post is aimed at those interested to learn how we build full-stack apps, and as an onboarding tool for those that join us in the future.

These are our core principles.

Keep It Simple

Easier said than done. Most developers understand simplicity is an important principle, but it’s not always easy to do. Simple code makes maintenance easier and makes it easier for all team members to contribute. …

I recently launched a mini side project that catalogues the latest investments in Israeli high tech:

It’s a simple site: one page containing a list of the 20 most recent investments that have happened in Israel. It also has a Google Sheet connected to it which acts as the database for the site. The database contains 4000 investments. In the near future the site will show all the investments too.

This post is about how I built it.

Tech Stack

• Gatsby (React)
• Google Sheets
• Now Serverless
• Netlify
• Mailchimp

Gatsby

Gatsby is a React based static site generator. It allows you to easily create sites that are lightning fast and SEO friendly. …

I recently started using TypeORM in a project with MongoDB and thought I’d share my thoughts on it.

TypeORM is typically used with SQL databases, but also has basic MongoDB support. Before I deciding to use TypeORM I tried doing some research online, but not too much came up. Others mentioned they were using it and it worked well enough for them, but didn’t go into too much detail. Hopefully this post covers those missing details for you and all the pain points you’ll face.

A quick summary of TypeORM from the homepage for those that haven’t used it before:

TypeORM is an ORM that can run in NodeJS, Browser, Cordova, PhoneGap, Ionic, React Native, NativeScript, Expo, and Electron platforms and can be used with TypeScript and JavaScript (ES5, ES6, ES7, ES8). …

A friend of mine looking to start a company has asked me to help him on the tech side.

He is in the process of raising seed funding and comes from a non-technical background. He is building an app that will need to be available across web, iOS, and Android. How should he go about building the app?

I’m a full stack freelance developer with a focus on Javascript. I mostly React for the frontend work I do. I also run a popular fantasy football game. …