DEV Community: Nick DeJesus

There's an Entire Ecosystem Yet to Be Built

Nick DeJesus — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:39:54 +0000

TL;DR Install Entire right now.

"Drift"

You want to launch a product. You go to your favorite agentic coding harness. You tell it, "Build me a $100m MRR. Make no mistakes".

You watch words scroll past. Salivating at the idea of the wealth that's coming your way.

"Shimmying..."

"Whirring..."

"Cranking..."

"Getting sturdy..." (this doesn't exist but it should).

It's done! Finally, you're set up for a successful business.

You open the app, you create an account to test. You start clicking through. Things don't look that great, but you figured at least the product works, right? You click through the core features. You realize it's actually not working at all. It just LOOKS like it works. You were vibe coding, but your LLM was happy path coding. Does this sound familiar? This is what I like to think of as Prompt Drift.

Maybe not exactly like this. But some version of it, every single day.

Exploring Backwards

How do you measure your prompt engineering? Most people are making changes as they go, hoping things will get better. But how would you even know if they did? When things aren't going your way, you're left to wonder:

What was my intention? Did I properly convey that to the LLM? How did the LLM interpret what I wanted?
Did the LLM properly reflect what I was trying to do?
If you came back to this codebase 3 months later, would you be able to explain why it was built this way?

These questions would straight up go unanswered. At best, you probably documented things somewhere, built your own system to track your history. But for the most part, when you look at that code, none of that context exists. Or rather, it does exist — it just didn't have a place to live.

Entire Solves This

Entire is a CLI tool that captures your entire agent session and associates it with the code that was written. Every time you commit, it quietly attaches the full conversation that produced that code to the commit itself. Not only would you have git history, you'd have prompt history too. Entire calls these snapshots Checkpoints.

Setup is easy — run their install steps, enable it with the CLI, and it attaches to your IDE's hooks. After that you never have to think about it again. Because of this smooth onboarding, and the fact that it's free, I genuinely believe you should have Entire set up on all your projects. This is one of those things you're gonna wish you had months down the line when you're putting out LLM-generated fires.

I've been using Entire extensively for the past two weeks and I realized there's a new lane for developer tooling. There is so much tooling that reads code — linters, review tools, docs generation. All of it depends on some kind of output. Entire brings a whole new layer to the picture that hasn't been this thoroughly captured before. We can now build developer tools that read intent as the resource. That context that once felt ephemeral is going to exist within your .entire folder.

Intent as a Resource

Every code review tool today (BugBot, CodeRabbit, Greptile etc) can only make a guess at intent. They read your diffs, your commits, your code structure, and they infer what you were trying to do. That's the best they can do, because the actual intent was never captured anywhere.

With Entire, that changes. The prompt history is right there. So I built a code review tool that reads it. I'm naming it Nimbus.

Nimbus pulls your Entire session context — what you asked for, what constraints you gave, what decisions were made — and uses it alongside the diff. The result is a review that can answer a question no other tool can: does this code actually reflect what you were trying to build?

It's early and there's a lot more to explore here. I'll write a full post about it soon. In the meantime it's open source: github.com/dayhaysoos/nimbus

If you want to try it on your own repo, reach out — I can set you up with an API token while I iterate on it.

The Ecosystem Is Just Getting Started

I highly recommend checking out Entire. It takes no time to install, it's free, and you're gonna appreciate yourself later for doing it. Join the Entire Discord — the community is just starting to form and it's worth being early.

Think about the bottlenecks you've been facing in this agentic coding era. I'm willing to bet some of them could have been resolved if you'd had a way to go back to the intent.

Entire introduces a shift. We've been building tools that read machine-made artifacts as the resource. Imagine what we could do now that we can capture human intent. We can solve for the drift that happens between what you meant and what you got.

Pivoting TalentMatch: Our Revamped Approach in Sourcing Black Technologists

Nick DeJesus — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 19:27:27 +0000

Black Tech Pipeline’s TalentMatch recruitment platform is going in a new direction. We’re migrating those who had previously signed up to our new recruitment platform (still named TalentMatch) or allowing those who are no longer interested to opt out.

Here is the TL;DR
While we’re proud of the initial launch of TalentMatch, the platform didn’t provide the value that we were hoping for. There were a number of variables at play that lead to this outcome; if you’d like to learn the in-depth details of our journey then please keep reading!

What happened?

Just to recap:

Pariss did manual sourcing and recruiting out of her own talent database that she built on Airtable. This talent database consisted of over 2,000 Black technologists open to new job opportunities. As Black Tech Pipeline gained more recruitment clients, they consistently asked us, “Can we search your talent database ourselves?” The answer was “No” at the time, but we knew the next step in scaling the business would be by automating the recruitment service and delivering this recruitment experience that so many clients wanted from us.

My tasks for building an MVP for TalentMatch consisted of:

Building a sign up experience for candidates where they can create and update TalentMatch profiles for our clients to source through
Keeping Candidates profiles anonymous by removing their name and any identifiable information to help mitigate bias
Building a searchable interface for clients to source through talent profiles
Building a communication system that allows Clients to reach out to anonymous Candidates if their skill set and experience fit a role they’re hiring for

These tasks were executed within 6 months.

Soon after announcing our launch, we had over 2,600 new interested TalentMatch candidates and 100+ new interested clients. Everything felt like it was off to a great start! Or so you’d think…

Things didn’t go as well as we hoped

First of all, right as we launched the new platform, the biggest names in the tech industry decided to do their layoffs and many companies followed shortly after. Many of our job board clients canceled their subscriptions to our job boards due to layoffs, hiring freezes or tighter budgets.

Of all the clients that wanted this new recruitment experience, not a single one of them followed up on their initial interest after we announced our launch. This meant that we had to prioritize getting potential new clients to sign up for our TalentMatch platform.

Getting new clients

Fortunately, there was always a stream of clients signing onto, or expressing interest in, the Black Tech Pipeline job board. During Pariss’ sales calls, she’d demo TalentMatch to her potential clients in case it'd be a better fit for their hiring needs. I did a lot of those calls as well!

However, from the few clients that did sign up and use the platform to source candidates, it just wasn’t enough to solidify keeping it around as a service and paying for the software we were using to maintain it.

The platform wasn’t as valuable as we hoped

The proposition of a database full of profiles of Black technical talent is very valuable, however, I think we missed the mark on trying to keep our candidates anonymous. Sourcing talent for companies is very difficult, even when profiles are public on places like LinkedIn. One of our goals is to remove friction from the recruitment process when it comes to sourcing Black technologists. However, giving employers a database of talent where they are totally anonymous just added another layer of friction for an already tough process.

Why did we keep candidates anonymous?

To help remove bias. We had our candidates omit things like places they previously worked and their names so that they wouldn't be discriminated against for any reason. It sounds like a cool idea, and maybe there is a way to make it work really well from a design and experience standpoint, but it’s not something we’ve quite figured out or that anyone, clients or candidates alike, even asked for.

What we're doing now (what we should have done)

I don’t think it’s fair to ignore the fact that the market got significantly worse by the time we launched TalentMatch. However, I do think if we took a slightly different approach, things may have worked out a bit better. That "slightly different approach" is what we’re launching with soon.

Check out some of the images below to see what we have in store for TalentMatch!

Hiring partners will log into their accounts to access our talent database full of talent profiles. Candidates will login to their accounts to view or update their talent profiles.

Candidates can upload their resume and let our AI resume parser fill out some of the profile fields for them. Or they can do it manually!

This is an example of what a candidates profile will look like to a hiring partner when sourcing candidate profiles in the TalentMatch database. When they click, ‘I’m interested’, a modal pops up that allows them to write and send the candidate a message that will go directly to the candidates email. If a candidate is not on the job market, they can simply ‘hide’ their profile from employers by using our switch feature.

This is what our interface for employers will look like. They can filter through our database to source candidates with the skill sets and requirements that they’re looking for.

Conclusion

Sometimes you gotta get things wrong before you get them right. Despite things not working out, we both learned a lot from this experience. Our clients are excited for this revamp and we hope you are too!

We’ll be announcing our launch of TalentMatch in the coming weeks. Subscribe to our free newsletter to be notified here.

Thank you for supporting Black Tech Pipeline. We hope to support you with your job hunt or hiring needs!

Unpaid CTO adventures: Getting my fiancee`s business to generating 100k a month.

Nick DeJesus — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 17:43:50 +0000

You ever wonder about what people do at the C-level of a company? I did too, and no matter how many times people described it to me or I looked it up, it still never really clicked. That is until my fianceè, Pariss, decided to launch her own business, Black Tech Pipeline (BTP). I've been witnessing her growth as an entrepreneur, Founder, CEO, and overall business woman. I'm extremely proud of how she's been handling it all on this first-time journey.

One side-effect of Pariss launching her business was me somehow becoming her CTO. It's different from what you might expect for most CTO's. I'm in an unpaid position and held in this role indefinitely. Since this is the case, I've been alongside Pariss in this journey of learning and growing, but on the technical side. Black Tech Pipeline has also become my baby, and I see the great potential it has to become one of the best digital platforms on the internet. With that being said, I have a better understanding of what C-level exec people worry and care about.

To oversimplify everything:

CEO's have to make sure that the business can make money and scale.

CTO's have to help the CEO with their goal, but focus on the tech side of things to make that goal come true.

These roles can look wildly different for everyone. It really depends on the business itself and what the people running it envision it to become. This is why my take may sound so vague.

Right now, BTP is doing very well, but I have a feeling that I can help Pariss grow and scale it into a business that can be generating $100,000 a month. There is a lot of context that needs to be painted for me to get to that part, so let me break down her business and give insight on the things I've had to care about as Unpaid CTO.

In this blog post, I'm going to break down my fianceé’s business model and talk about how I, Unpaid CTO, plan to alleviate a lot of the work that Pariss has on her shoulders, while also helping Black Tech Pipeline make more money.

The business:

Black Tech Pipeline✨

blacktechpipeline.com

BTP is a job board and recruiting agency focused on connecting Black technologists to open job opportunities in the tech industry.

First order of business, as CTO, was for me to build the website!

https://blacktechpipeline.com

BTP has two business models: A job board and a recruiting service.

The job board:

Every company on the BTP job board receives a landing page that contains content around that companies values, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives, safety policies, what type of leadership they have, an overview of their interview process, benefits, and images of their team.

Companies interested in being on the BTP job board have to take a discovery call with Pariss. She wants to learn more about the interested company, share more information on BTP, and talk about whether partnering may be a good fit or not. After every call, they receive an automated rate sheet that details BTP's services and pricing structure. If the company is interested in partnering, Pariss sends the company a legal agreement, and once that's signed, the company receives a questionnaire to fill out that Pariss uses to build them their landing page for the job board. Every job board is completely unique, thanks to MDX (I'll talk a bit about that later).

Recruitment:

BTP has a talent database with over 1,500 Black tech candidates from all around the world! They're mainly in the US, but also in Canada, the EU, UK, and Africa. They range from junior, to mid-level, to senior, and up. They're diverse in gender, education, tech stack, field in tech, and more.

When companies are interested in recruitment, Pariss sends them a form that asks questions about the roles they'd like her and her team to source for, and anything they should keep in mind while sourcing. Then, Pariss and her sourcing assistants search the talent database for candidates that fit the requirements of that companies open roles. They connect interested candidates over to those companies, and if the company hires a BTP candidate, BTP gets a 20% cut of the hires first year base salary- standard pricing for recruiting.

BTP's recruitment service has a unique and valuable model. After a company hires a candidate through recruitment, there is a 90 day check-in model where Pariss meets with the candidate and the organization separately, virtually, and bi-weekly to make sure that everything the hire is having a good experience and being set up for success. If there are any issues with the employer, she works with them on reviewing policies or procedures to improve the hires experience and to help the company retain them. So not only is her service a recruiting platform, her clients are also paying for transparent feedback on themselves as an employer that will improve the current and futures hires experience.

She does have other miscellaneous revenue streams from the website but we're not going to get into those.

How business has been doing

Phenomenal! Since launching BTP in September 2020, Pariss is averaging around 20k a month and business isn't slowing down at all. She's partnered with some of the biggest companies in the world, as well as start ups and everything in between. She has many returning clients and gets new ones from word of mouth, news articles and social media. She hasn't had to do any outreach at all.

Honestly, if she wanted to continue this way forever, I don't think it's a bad idea as a life style business. If you think in terms of scalability and growth, there are definitely things that can be worked on, but I'll get to that in a moment.

The current stack:

Gatsby hosted on Netlify

Gatsby was my go-to choice for me on this because I absolutely love how you can process and format data and bake it into a GraphQL layer. We knew we'd be needing a job board for the site and would have to have a page for every client. To keep things simple and affordable, I wanted to use Markdown as the source of data and figured I could use Gatsby's life cycle methods to build out the pages.

Forestry CMS

I wanted a CMS that connected directly to GitHub that also allowed you to create Markdown files. They have a very generous free-tier and it allowed her the ability to launch her business until she could afford to pay.

MDX

I love MDX so much! MDX allows you to use React in Markdown files. With MDX, she's given enough flexibility on the landing pages for companies to speak from their own voices and brand the way they want to. If you look at each page on the job board, they are completely unique. Most job boards have a specified format that displays the same amount of data per employer. Some clients have videos, some have more pictures than others and they're all in whatever order they want.

Magic links 🪄

Conceptually, magic links are a form of passwordless login.

We use magic links that allow clients to update the job board roles on their own. Instead of giving them a log in, they use the magic link on an interface that actually updates the Black Tech Pipeline GitHub repo, which then triggers a Netlify build.

We got help setting this up by an agency called Upstatement. Would highly recommend hiring them for marketing, design or dev work, they have some geniuses over there!

Airtable We hold all the candidate data in Airtable. It's been a tremendous help with getting kicked off, however, we are starting to find it limiting and might have to look elsewhere (my biggest problem to solve, yet).

The Problems

Earlier, I said that business is going great and it'd be totally fine if Pariss wanted to continue the way she is now. From a scalibility perspective, there's quite a few problems we have:

Black Tech Pipeline can't run without Pariss

Pariss literally is the business. There is no way that Black Tech Pipeline can function without her existence. This might sound nice because it places a really heavy importance on an individual, which allows for extreme job security, but there are quite a few issues with this. When a person is the business itself, that usually means there aren't enough systems in place that help the business move along to reach its full potential. It also means that she is doing a lot of the work on her own.

I believe that a good solution for this is to set her up so that BTP is a business that anyone could run. We could set up very detailed documentation to talk through processes we have in place, and/or leverage my Unpaid CTO skills to build something that handles some of these processes for her (spoilers).

Airtable isn't sustainable long term

If you're a candidate that's part of the database, you submit your data once and that's that. If something changes, like location or number, you have to resubmit instead of updating your data. We'd like to actually start putting out ads to get more candidates in the database, but we are hesitant to do that while everything is relying on Airtable at the moment.

It would be ideal to allow candidates to submit their application and keep it up to date over time. This would make us feel better about the integrity of our data.

Getting a hold of candidates is hard

Recruiting seems easy because you're simply asking people if they'd like to interview for a high paying job. However, it's not that simple at all. The solution to this, in my perspective, wouldn't be to build something to contact people easier and faster. If people want to be available, they will be available. Along with waiting for replies, sourcing also requires a lot of time and energy to search and reach out.

I think the answer here would be to increase the amount of candidates in our database. Right now, we have over 1,500 candidates and it's hard to get them to reply to cold emails in general. If we had a database with over 10,000 candidates, perhaps our chances of getting a response would be easier. If there was a way to increase the chance of individual responses alone, I'd go that route but I can't think of a reasonable way to go about solving that.

We can't display candidate data

Many clients have asked if there was a way that they could view the candidates in the database themselves but we can't allow it. We always want to vet employers and understand their DE&I and safety practices before introducing them to our candidates. We also want to keep track of who's reaching out to who, and where everyone is in their interview process.

However, finding a way to allow employers to source candidates themselves would give us back a lot of time to focus on other tasks and allows the recruitment model to scale itself. It's an interesting obstacle to overcome.

So to quickly recap on the problems:

We need more systems in place to handle Pariss' tasks. We want BTP to be in a position where other people can run it on their own.
Airtable was great for starting but not ideal long term. Mostly want to allow candidates to update their data as time goes on.
It's too hard to recruit as more and more companies request that service. It's very time consuming and it's hard to get candidates to respond.
Can't give clients direct access to the database.

Ultimately, the recruiting part of her business is a significant money making part. We'd like to get better at landing recruits by increasing the number of candidates in the database, but Airtable is not going to scale well for that. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem.

The Solution

I'm going to build a platform for Black Tech Pipeline, a web app on Next JS and AWS Amplify. Both Candidates and Employers will both be able to create accounts and will get assigned specific roles.

Candidates will be able to upload similar data to what they do now in the Airtable database, but also get the ability to update info as things change and delete their info from the backend.

Pariss and her assistants will be able to search the database as they already do with Airtable, but the integrity of the data will be better since I can set up forms with validation and formatting a bit better than Airtable can.

There's also something I want to try out and see if I can take things further.

We want to give the employers the ability to search the an anonymous version of the talent database. Basically, there will be only enough information to know if they would be interested in talking to the candidate, not enough to identify. We also will give the candidates a space in the form for an "anonymous pitch", where we ask them to write a paragraph about their experiences and what they're looking for in a way that doesn't give away who they are.

I want to provide a system where an employer will "like" an anonymous candidates profile, Black Tech Pipeline employees will get notified of that interest, and they can go and reach out to the candidates on the employer's behalf if they want. It can also be looked at as a way of "bookmarking" a candidate for future reference. This, of course, is optional for companies that have active recruiters.

To be honest, I'm probably going to need to talk to some lawyers about this "anonymous search" approach, but I'm excited to do some exploring.

If things go really well, Pariss will be able to land multiple 4-5 recruits a month, which would bring her around 100k a month (if most salaries are near 100k and she takes 20% cut of first year salary). From there, she'll get so tied up in consultations with her hires and employer partners that she'll have to use those funds to hire more people to help her run the business, taking things to the next level.

Wrapping up

If you've made it this far, I want to say thank you so much for reading. I really enjoy my role as Unpaid CTO and figured I'd share parts of what it's like having such an important role. I've already started building and want to say I'm maybe 60% through the things I've detailed above, I'll be saving much more technical blog posts for later.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions, feel free to hit me up on Twitter!

How AWS Amplify saves you lots of time

Nick DeJesus — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:59:23 +0000

Have you been curious about whether or not you should learn AWS Amplify?

I was curious for a very long time and took forever before I decided to jump in. My hesitation came from a few different places:

I was worried that Amplify might be some big magical box that I wouldn't understand.

These "magic boxes" feel fun at first, but as soon as you need to do something that's a little more custom for your needs, you waste a lot of time trying to figure out the workarounds and nuances instead of focusing on the important parts of your apps.

If I had to be honest, I saw quite a bit of feedback around Amplify being only great if you "stay on the path paved before you". At the same time, I saw tons of praise around what can be done with it.

I always believe at the end of the day, you have to try these things out for yourself. What might not work for others might work well for you.

I was worried about costs

There's quite a few nightmare stories out there about AWS bills, there are even consultants that are purely focused on saving you money on your AWS implementations. For my needs, personally, I haven't had to worry about any of that, it's definitely something to consider if you're getting into cloud technology.

AWS Docs

I don't even know where to begin with this one. There is so much documentation for so many services, I find it really hard to accurately look up what I'm trying to do. Trying to figure what you need has been overwhelming to me. I have no idea how anyone learns AWS without talking to people who already know AWS. Fortunately, the Amplify docs are much easier to navigate than everything else. And there's also tons of material from both those working on AWS and the community.

The Real Deal

One of the most pleasing things about working with Amplify is how much time I've saved. There are lots of "nice to haves" that I can see myself getting very attached to over time. I'm going to go over a list of ways that Amplify saves you a massive chunk of time:

Set up, Configuration and extending via CLI

Amplify comes with a CLI that allows you to get up and running relatively quickly. It asks you questions about the services you'd like to use and how. After the initial set up, you can continue using the CLI to extend the capabilities of your app with commands like amplify add, where you can add Cognito User Pools, Lambda's and DynamoDB tables. It walks you through each aspect of what you're trying to do and even provides templates for Lambda's if you need something to reference.

It writes your APIs for you

It's highly recommended that you use AWS AppSync with your Amplify apps. AppSync allows you to easily create GraphQL APIs that can connect to other services you may be using.

So how is it that you get to skip writing APIs?

It's all within the GraphQL schema. Let's take a look at an example schema from the Amplify Docs:

type Blog @model {
  id: ID!
  name: String!
  posts: [Post] @connection(name: "BlogPosts")
}
type Post @model {
  id: ID!
  title: String!
  blog: Blog @connection(name: "BlogPosts")
  comments: [Comment] @connection(name: "PostComments")
}
type Comment @model {
  id: ID!
  content: String
  post: Post @connection(name: "PostComments")
}

This schema defines the different aspects of your API and the relationships between the types. From here, you'd run amplify push and Amplify would generate a bunch of graphql queries and mutations for you to import on the client side of your app. You can read about this in much more detail here

From the example above, it would make GQL queries like createBlog, createPost, and createComment along with the update and deletion queries as well.

Assuming you configured DynamoDB with your Amplify project, these queries would be managing your database accordingly.

To take things further, you get a helper library for using these queries or mutations. It'll look something like:

import { API } from 'aws-amplify'
import { createBlog } from '../graphql/mutations'

API.graphql({
    query: createBlog,
    variables: { input: { name: "My New Blog" } }

It works the same way for getting, updating and deleting blog data.

You can effortlessly refactor, add or remove anything from the schema to fit your needs. Changing this API is a matter of updating the GraphQL schema and running amplify push. This by far is the most valuable thing about Amplify, it's worth investing time and energy into mastering schema design.

If you're curious about extending your API, using other services and handling authentication, you can look at the directives provided here

Helper libraries

The aws-amplify package is really great for removing the friction from using AWS services.

There are also ui libraries for many different frameworks, like @aws-amplify/ui-react.

Amplify Admin UI

Let's say you made an app for your client and it's required that the client has to make updates to certain aspects of your database or user groups. Normally, you'd have to build out a whole dashboard just for them to be able to log in and handle things. The Amplify Admin UI is exactly that out of the box. You can invite your client to log in to it and you can customize what they have access to. This is another major time saver, I plan on learning much more about this for my current project.

Conclusion

I'm really happy with my commitment to Amplify. It really allows me to worry less about the nitty gritty details of configuration and setting up so that I can work on the core features of the projects I build. I'm going to be writing more posts about my learnings and how I use Amplify in the future, can't wait to share my journey with y'all!

use-shopping-cart 3.0.0 is finally released! What changed and what's to come?

Nick DeJesus — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 14:33:16 +0000

Intro

If you don't know what use-shopping-cart is, it's a Stripe-based library that manages your shopping cart state and logic. I made it because:

I realized how horrible it is to roll your own shopping cart and never want myself or anyone else to experience that again.
Making money online should be easier and more equitable. What better place to see this through than Open Source?

About 5 months ago (February 2021), someone asked me if they could use this library on an HTML only site. The answer was no, because use-shopping-cart was only a hooks library. This didn't feel good because of point number 2 I made earlier, "Easier and more equitable". While I am happy to make this contribution to React developers, I couldn't help but think, "But what about everyone else?"

The very next day, I opened up a draft pull request on GitHub.

The plan was to convert a React hooks library to redux. I honestly had no idea what to do next but I knew it was possible because the redux docs provide an HTML/JS way of using it. That kept me goin'!

215 commits later, and with the help of some amazing contributors, I finally was able to release use-shopping-cart 3.0.0!

What changed

Honestly, the major change is the fact that use-shopping-cart has now become framework agnostic. This means that this library can be useful to people who use other JS frameworks, like Angular, Vue and Svelte.

What's funny is that despite the massive amount of work, if you've already been using this with React, it's possible you won't feel any of the changes. For the most part there are small API things, for example:

addItem() used to accept 4 params, but now it accepts 2 params, with the second being an options object.

I'm going to make a much more technical blog post about what it was like making this conversion to redux sometime soon, so be on the look out if you're curious about that!

You can check out the new docs site, we're using docusaurus now and it's pretty amazing. Major shout out to https://twitter.com/erchwy for helping me by kicking this off!

Here's the link to the docs:

https://useshoppingcart.com

What's to come

This is what I'm really excited for! Now that redux is being used under the hood, this is the chance to make this library work for other frameworks. High on the priority list making this work with Angular, Vue and Svelte.

If anyone is looking for any open source opportunities, especially if you use those frameworks and would like to take advantage of use-shopping-cart, feel free to hit me up and we can talk it through!

Some new, smaller features on the way:

New cart state for cart interaction. It'll allow for little notifications like, "item added to cart" and disappear after a few seconds.
A "custom" cartMode if you wanted to use the cart state and logic but with a different payment platform
Helper functions that'll help with rendering UIs, but I can't speak much about this one yet 🤐
Methods for dynamically adding metadata for products and prices

I'm probably going to open up issues on GitHub for the things we have planned next if anyone is interested in taking a look.

I want to give a shout out to Andria for doing such thorough code reviews and making sure this project stays in a great shape since the beginning, I can't imagine getting this far without your insight.

Also shout out to Jason for taking a look at our tests and fixing the bugs we had there, as well as hopping on calls to talk through Vue integrations and future plans. I'm so glad you happen to enjoy the really the things in programming that I do not enjoy :D

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! As a side note, I've been learning AWS and I'm very interested in seeing what it's like to use this library with a real backend so I can better support real world scenarios.

If you have any questions or want to make any contributions or anything, please reach out to me at either nick@dayhaysoos.com or DM me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dayhaysoos

PS:

use-shopping-cart is officially in the Stripe partner directory:
https://stripe.com/partners/use-shopping-cart

Don't seek mentors, seek friends

Nick DeJesus — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 00:58:48 +0000

There seems to be a lot of talk around finding a mentor in the tech industry.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of mentorship is great. How could having a dedicated person for all of your learning be a bad thing?

The problem is that finding a mentor, especially one for free, is not going to work out well most of the time. The last thing you want to do is make someone who didn’t really sign up for it feel like they have a responsibility to help you. There are a lot of people who love the idea of being mentors but in reality, it’s hard to keep up with it on both ends. Either you have to deal with some life situations and can’t make the time to meet with the mentor or vice versa.

The best thing you can do in my opinion is look for friends, not mentors. Here’s how you can make friends but also fill that mentoring gap:

Tell people what you're doing

This is one of my favorite things to do, in fact, I'm lucky to have always done this for as long as I can remember.

Chris Biscardi once said, "If you don't tell anyone what you're doing, people will assume you're doing nothing". I think this captures the idea of why you should be expressing your interests often.

Mind you, this doesn't have to be a social media thing. Literally, tell people what you're doing, what you're interested in, what you've done, how you've done it, how you feel about it anywhere you want to whoever you want, even if they themselves aren't interested in that particular topic.

One thing people love to do is connect the dots. To get my foot in the door as a software engineer, I told tons of people I wanted to be a software engineer, and some of them would get excited. "Oh! I know someone who is a software engineer, you want me to introduce you?". This can go a really long way because if that person doesn't end up being a big help, they probably know someone who can.

There's another aspect of this that's just as valuable. Perhaps you told someone who has no idea what technology is that you're interested in technology. The conversation goes nowhere. Life continues. All of a sudden, the person who knows nothing about technology eventually hits you up to let you know they found a great opportunity in technology and remembered that one conversation y'all had.

Telling people what you're doing enables them to tell their networks what you're doing as well!

Telling people what you're doing is a huge aspect of not just reaching out, but also attracting like-minded people. There are others who want to learn the things you want to learn, others who want to talk about what you've learned, and others who want to help you learn what you want to learn. The sky is the limit when you're just vocal about you.

Find a community

This is what the Internet is for. Going out there and finding people who are into what you're into. This could mean joining slack channels, forums, subreddits, following specific hashtags on Twitter or Instagram and my personal favorite, discord servers.

When you join communities, you actually are in a place where you can get way more perspective than a solo mentor would be able to give you. Asking a question to a group of people gives you responses from someone who has been doing what you're trying to do for the past 20 years, or someone who just figured it out yesterday, someone who is also facing the same struggle as you and has just as much experience. All of that being in one place is so valuable. You're getting wisdom, perspective, and the experience of a group of people that no single person could provide.

You can also post/ask questions at even the unholiest of hours. Are you going to get a response right away? Depending on the community, maybe you will, but someone is gonna wake up the next morning and might feel like replying when they see it. Even if the people who frequently answer your questions aren't around anymore, someone is going to be there eventually. That's how communities work.

There's definitely an art in the way you ask questions and get help. I have a post about asking for help for developers:

https://dayhaysoos.com/how-to-ask-for-help/

The community I learn the most from right now is the Party Corgi discord channel.

https://discord.com/invite/partycorgi

Here, I learn so much about JamStack and Serverless, content creation, product and business, and baking and cooking (even though I don't participate in that channel at all).

It's one of the healthiest communities I've ever been apart of, Chris Biscardi is doing a great job at running it. My journey for seeking friends lead me right into here. Funny thing is, I was invited by someone else who just knew I'd love to chat about the things I mentioned above.

There are so many communities for so many different interests out there. If you joined one and don't feel at home, you can find others. You'll see that you're not going to get a specific mentor, but a bunch of friends that'll support you on your journey.