I initially tried GitHub Copilot, just briefly, around the beginning of 2022. It raised my attention partly due to its name - I hold a private pilot license and have always been an aviation enthusiast. At that time, I found the idea intriguing, but the product usability was not so satisfactory: both in terms of speed and quality of generation. I started to reuse it about three months ago, and now it has become indispensable to me and worth every penny of that $10/mon that I pay.

What makes me a happy customer? Let's figure it out.

Web development, especially frontend, is undoubtedly one of the most challenging professions in software development. Its landscape is constantly evolving. Tools and technologies become obsolete and replaced by new ones at an astonishing speed. It has also become a vast field, way beyond HTML, CSS and Javascript. Going back ten years, could you imagine that frontend developers, who use an interpreted language to write code, would need to mess with all kinds of compilation tools in their daily job? Pretty insane, isn't it?

But Rome wasn't built in a day. Let's travel back in time to see how we got here step by step.

The Prisma schema is intuitive and lets you declare your database tables in a human-readable way. The thing I like most is to be able to use it as the single source of truth for the data models of my application. However, to be able to get that for more cases, there should be a good extension mechanism. Otherwise, Prisma would have to cover all the different cases by itself to achieve that universally.

Web development's landscape is ever-changing. We started from bare metal machines serving static HTML pages, to the rise of the LAMP stack, then the MEAN stack, and now the JAM stack.

Almost all the SaaS now is collaborative, from the originator Salesforce to the newly emerging one like Notion. To make it collaborative, technically, we need to build the foundation to support tenant isolation with an access control policy. A classic challenge here is striking a balance between app security and dev productivity.

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a SaaS product using Next.js and ZenStack and the benefit of using a data model as the single source of truth to handle access control.

If you're in the SaaS business or into trying out different web apps, you've likely heard of Cal.com. It's an fantastic product that helps you schedule meetings with clients more efficiently - simply set your availability, share your public booking link, and let people book when it works for both of you.

This post demonstrates how easy it is to make a simplified clone of Cal.com with a modern Javascript stack - Remix.run, Prisma, and ZenStack.

Backend development is difficult for people who come entirely from a frontend background. The languages, frameworks, and tools differ, but more importantly, the frontend and backend systems have very different principles. Fortunately, a new generation of libraries and services is trying to fill the gap and simplify coding a backend by …, not coding it at all.

No, you didn’t read it wrong. It’s PostgREST, not Postgres 😄. Although the naming is prone to misreading and not friendly to search engines, it perfectly reflects what the project does - it adds a RESTful API layer to PostgreSQL. This post is a quick introduction to what it is, how it works, and what kind of scenarios it fits best.