Blog

Thoughts, tutorials, and technical insights.

Deployment and DevOps lessons nobody warned me about
What I learned the hard way
Mar 4, 202612 min

Deployment and DevOps lessons nobody warned me about

Wrong env vars, no rollback plan, Friday deploys, silent crashes. After years of production incidents, here are the 10 DevOps lessons I learned the hard way.

DevOpsDeploymentCI/CD
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What I wish I knew before launching my first SaaS
What I learned the hard way
Feb 26, 202614 min

What I wish I knew before launching my first SaaS

Wrong tech choices, over-engineering, bad pricing, features nobody asked for. After a year building Academy, here are the 10 lessons I learned the hard way.

SaaSStartupLessons Learned
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What 3 years of code reviews taught me
What I learned the hard way
Feb 18, 202610 min

What 3 years of code reviews taught me

I used to think code reviews were about finding bugs. After hundreds of PRs, here are the 10 lessons that changed how I review and receive feedback.

Code ReviewsBest PracticesTeamwork
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How I structure a Next.js project after 3 years
What I learned the hard way
Feb 13, 202612 min

How I structure a Next.js project after 3 years

Components everywhere, utils mixed with hooks, routes importing from random folders. After dozens of projects, here's the structure that actually scales.

Next.jsArchitectureTypeScript
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The performance mistakes I made on my first real app
What I learned the hard way
Feb 11, 202614 min

The performance mistakes I made on my first real app

Re-renders everywhere, 2.5MB bundles, 5000 DOM nodes. Here are the 7 performance mistakes I made and the fixes that actually worked.

ReactPerformanceReact.memo
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Why I stopped using useEffect for fetching
What I learned the hard way
Feb 6, 202612 min

Why I stopped using useEffect for fetching

I spent months fighting race conditions, stale data, and boilerplate. The real problem was using a synchronization tool for a caching problem.

ReactuseEffectTanStack Query
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Blog | Samy DJEMILI