DEV Community: Fahad Khan

Debugging the invisible

Fahad Khan — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 14:08:03 +0000

So I was working on a side project during my leisure time and an interesting thing happened.

I developed a grid layout with 2 columns at each row. worked as expected → big achievement :D

Here, I used an array of objects and iterated over it. Simple and straight forward work so far.

Now, I knew that the description of each object can vary and the respective column should adapt to keep the UI visually appealing. Hence I added a random word — A SINGLE, LONG word — without giving much notice to it and chaos followed.

{
    description: "I have been involved asasasasasasasasasasasddasdasd"
}

The result? Well…

The Frustration

And the coffee cups started to pile up, sweat kicking in, what did I do wrong?

Maybe…

some parent element is breaking the ui?
do I need to revisit the basics?
maybe if I restart?

well folks, 15 minutes in, nothing seemed to work. so I started making the grid layout again from scratch!

and it turns out its working FINE NOW!!

WHAT?? AHHHHHHHHHHHH...

The Solution

Mhm, no space between the word, hmm, A single word then, maybe if I… Woah!!

Around 6 Months of experience as a MERN dev and I never knew :)

so basically a single, long-enough word that exceeds the column length, will OVERFLOW.

but wait, if it happens, do we not have a way around it? WE DO! Just use hyphens-auto it ensures that if the word is long enough, it will be hyphenated to the next line.

The Lesson

Turns out, the real bug was my assumption. And the fix? Curiosity!

BEWARE FOLKS! Even a single word can break the UI, literally. Don’t just code, understand it.

PS: Just sharing my experiences. much love :D

Architectural Decision: Should Every Role Have Its Own Schema?

Fahad Khan — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:41:21 +0000

Context:

I'm working on a School ERP web application built using the MERN stack.
We have a "users" schema that acts as a base model for various roles like:

Teachers
Students
Parents

Each of these role-specific users has its own schema containing relevant information, built on top of the base "users" schema, ensuring separation of concerns.

For example, the school owner is also a User, but they don’t require any additional information. In this case, the School schema simply contains a reference to the User who owns it.

My Dilemma:

Now, I’ve been asked to implement a new role: "Sub-Admins".

Here’s the catch:

Sub-admins don’t need any additional fields.
They can be documented using the existing "users" schema.
The only thing that distinguishes them is a field that references the school(s) they are associated with.
Each school can have multiple sub-admins.

My Questions :

So now I’m trying to decide:

Should I create a separate schema for sub-admins, just like I’ve done for teachers, students, and parents? Keeps the structure consistent -- Adds unnecessary complexity
Should I simply add a new reference field (e.g., subAdminSchool) directly to the "users" schema? Simple and direct -- Might introduce confusion, since other roles don’t store extra fields inside users

I've confirmed that the sub-admin role is unlikely to need additional fields in the near future.

Any advice, insights, or experiences would be highly appreciated. The coffee cups are piling up folks!! Thank you!!

DSA progress log- Day 1

Fahad Khan — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:42:29 +0000

Problem: Remove Duplicates from Sorted Array
Platform: LeetCode

*Problem statement: *
Given an integer array nums sorted in non-decreasing order, remove the duplicates in-place such that each unique element appears only once. The relative order of the elements should be kept the same. Then return the number of unique elements in nums.

Approach: Two Pointers
We initialize two pointers a and b with 0 and 1 values repectively, than we iterate over the array one time, increment pointer b on each iteration, and increment pointer a once only if nums[a] < nums[b], since the array is in non-decreasing order.

Complexities

Time - O(n)
Space - O(1)

Complete Guide Here:
https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-duplicates-from-sorted-array/solutions/6901913/javascript-solution-by-fahad_khan1226-9sgn

var removeDuplicates = function(nums) { let a = 0, b = 1; while(b < nums.length) { if(nums[a] < nums[b]) { nums[++a] = nums[b]; } b++; } return a + 1; };