TechBlog

Every developer has been there: you inherit a codebase that looks like a bowl of spaghetti, and your first instinct is to say, “We need to rewrite this.” You see the outdated libraries, the inconsistent naming conventions, and the lack of unit tests, and you think, “I could do this so much better from scratch.” But a rewrite is rarely just a technical decision. It’s a social and ethical one. Legacy code is code that is working. It’s code that is paying the bills, processing the transactions, and serving the users. When we dismiss it as “trash,” we are dismissing the context, the constraints, and the hard work of the engineers who came before us. ...

When you open up a 1970s radio, you aren’t met with logs or stack traces. You’re met with voltages, currents, and signals. If the audio is distorted, you don’t “grep” for an error; you trace the signal path from the antenna to the speaker. Modern microservices aren’t that different, though we often forget it. We’ve traded copper wires for HTTP requests and vacuum tubes for Docker containers, but the fundamental challenge of observability remains the same: how do you understand what’s happening inside a complex, distributed system without tearing it apart? ...

Design systems are promised as the ultimate productivity booster. “Build once, use everywhere.” And for the first six months, it’s true. You see the velocity of your feature teams skyrocket as they stop arguing about hex codes and start assembling pages from a library of pre-built components. But as your team grows and your product evolves, the very system that was supposed to speed you up can start to slow you down. At work, we built a comprehensive Angular-based design system that initially reduced delivery time by 40%. However, as we scaled, we hit the “maintenance phase”: the point where the cost of consistency began to rival the cost of development itself. ...

Angular Signals have changed the way we think about reactivity in the frontend. But if you step outside the world of JavaScript, the concept of a “Signal” has a much older, much deeper history in Control Theory and Electrical Engineering. When we talk about “glitch-free” execution in Angular, we are actually talking about maintaining the integrity of a signal graph. I’ll explore the connection between the physics of signals and the architecture of modern web applications. ...

Companion resource Companion Project Explore the complete working example on GitHub. github.com/omidfarhang/example-projects/examples/jupyter-blog-starter View on GitHub In the previous parts, we discussed why Jupyter is a “thinking environment.” In this final part, we’ll walk through four concrete scenarios where a notebook outperforms a traditional IDE for a senior engineer. 1. API Archaeology: Mapping the Unknown When you’re dealing with a complex API, you don’t want to build a full client just to see what the data looks like. ...

Companion resource Companion Project Explore the complete working example on GitHub. github.com/omidfarhang/example-projects/examples/jupyter-blog-starter View on GitHub The Modern Jupyter Stack For a software engineer, the “standard” way of installing Jupyter (global pip install) is often the wrong way. It leads to dependency hell and “it works on my machine” syndrome. Here is a professional setup guide. 1. Installation & Environment Management The “UV” Way (Recommended) If you haven’t tried uv yet, it’s a lightning-fast Python package manager. It makes managing Jupyter environments trivial. ...

If you come from a traditional software engineering background (frontend, backend, systems), chances are you’ve seen Project Jupyter everywhere, from notebooks and extensions to cloud platforms, and thought: “This looks huge… but I don’t really see where I fit in.” I had the same confusion. Let’s look at it clearly, using roles, not buzzwords. First: What Jupyter Is Not Jupyter is not: A programming language (unlike R or Python) A replacement for IDEs like VS Code A production development environment A competitor to ChatGPT or Copilot If you try to use it as any of those, it will feel awkward. ...

Angular’s @ViewChild and @ContentChild decorators provide a powerful way to interact with child components, DOM elements, and projected content within a component’s template. While they are often misunderstood or used interchangeably, each has its own specific purpose and use cases. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll dive deep into both decorators, understanding their differences, use cases, and best practices. Additionally, we’ll explore advanced techniques for leveraging them in various scenarios and edge cases, complete with sample code for hands-on understanding. ...

Programming languages are the backbone of the digital world, enabling us to create software that powers everything from our smartphones to space exploration. While most developers are familiar with popular languages like Python, JavaScript, and C++, there’s a fascinating and lesser-known realm of programming languages that exist outside the mainstream. These are known as esoteric programming languages, or “esolangs” for short. Esoteric programming languages are not designed for practical use or efficiency. Instead, they are created as a form of artistic expression, puzzles, or to explore unusual concepts in computer science. Some esolangs challenge the very idea of what a programming language can be, while others are designed to be intentionally difficult to use. In this post, we’ll delve into the hidden world of esoteric programming languages, exploring their history, purpose, and some of the most intriguing examples. ...

In today’s rapidly evolving web development landscape, GraphQL has emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional REST APIs. This blog post will guide you through the process of migrating your Express.js backend and Angular frontend from REST to GraphQL, unlocking the benefits of a more flexible and efficient API architecture. Companion resource Companion Project Explore the complete working example on GitHub. github.com/omidfarhang/example-projects/examples/graphql-express-angular-migration View on GitHub 1. Introduction REST (Representational State Transfer) has been the go-to architectural style for building web APIs for many years. However, GraphQL, developed by Facebook, offers several advantages: ...