DEV Community: Brittney Kernan

Getting Started with Graphite: A No-Fluff Guide

Brittney Kernan — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 01:08:21 +0000

For visual learners who want to learn the basics of PR stacking quickly.

Why use Graphite? Have you ever based branches on top of others and opened PRs for them? Yes. Does it get messy? Yes. Graphite makes this, called stacking PRs, easier and less time consuming.

What is Graphite? A web platform and cli. The web platform feels like a next gen Github. The CLI is like git.

Step 0: Check out their cool website and create a Free dev account

Step 1: Watch the first 4 or more videos in Graphite’s Getting started with Graphite video playlist

Step 2: Install the CLI

Step 3: Follow their demo to get hands on experience by running: gt demo

Step 4: Create your own cheatsheet to strengthen memory of cli commands

Step 5: Get to work

Bonus: Integrate with Slack for notifications

Learning time: Under an hour

I hope you found this helpful and concise.

Tiny Brain Hack for Getting Over Fear of Coding Something New

Brittney Kernan — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 02:57:50 +0000

A little brain hack to quiet that fearful voice in your brain when coding something new:

write a quick list of steps to tackle the problem
write the difficulty next to each step
code
reread the difficulty when the fear kicks up

My brain will tell me steps are more difficult than they will be, but from experience, I know the brain is exaggerating. Raising risk is the brain’s job, so let it do its thing, you do yours.

What is a memberwise initializer in Swift?

Brittney Kernan — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 17:10:00 +0000

This is a heuristic I, a front-end developer learning SwiftUI, used to mentally map this intimidating term.

Mapping each word:

Initializer: A function that initializes an instance of an object, in this case, a structure, a.k.a. struct
Member: Members is another term for the properties of the struct
Wise: Knowledgable about the struct members/properties and capable of generating code

Putting it together:

A memberwise initializer is an initializer function that the Swift compiler conveniently auto-generates for you when you define a struct. This saves you the mundane task of writing an initializer function for structs.

A visual:

See the suggested completion for the Song struct. It shows you the memberwise initializer’s function signature. Notice I did not type out an init function.

Try it yourself:

struct Song {
    let bpm: Int
    let artist: String
}
let greatestHit = Song( // code completion pops up here

I encourage you to build a deeper understanding of the term by reading Bart Jacobs' article on memberwise initializers and following along with his code examples in XCode’s Playground. It’s also always a good idea to read the official Apple documentation, for now on memberwise initializers, for the freshest information, as Swift is updated about twice yearly.

Thanks for your time. Let me know if you have questions or suggested improvements to this post.