What are “cost blocks” in tech? — I was trying to wrap up monthly credit card expenses for my wife and I when I got to the transportation expenses: namely Lyft and Uber. To track these down, I typically go to the website, look at the ride history, and compare listed rides with the charges side by…

Almost two years later, there is a CLEAR winner — Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post comparing React Native and Flutter at a time when I was still somewhat new to Flutter. I had spoken very highly of it, but also paid some respect to React Native. I had more experience with React Native and loved (and…

How AI contributes to “representational harms” and does so with impunity — I came across this post on LinkedIn that described how AI was used to generate images of Barbie dolls when given countries as prompts. The results were pretty alarming. These results further highlight the flaws in AI with regards to awareness, empathy, and context. The images and videos conceived as…

The good doesn’t come close to outweighing the bad — It’s no secret that AI has been wildly disruptive in the last year — and it is expected to become even more so. That disruption brings with it controversy. One of the ways that it is causing controversy in the use for video production. Why is it controversial? At the…

Better ways to use that money to prepare you for home ownership. — In my previous post, I wrote about a post on instagram where a real estate agent was saying that if you and your partner could saved $578 a week starting now then they could afford a down payment on a house by the end of the year. While it is…

The Math Behind the Mortgage — I would like to preface this with saying that while I am not a financial advisor, I do consider myself pretty responsible and knowledgeable when it comes to money, budgeting, maintaining good credit, etc. I wanted to include other great ways to use the money you’ve been saving in this…

A quick way to ensure your functional components have consistent states — While working on the React Native CaptureSDK for Socket Mobile, I tried to test the latest feature additions when I noticed something peculiar in the example app. I had trouble reliably accessing various state values in my component and wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. To provide better context…

When a hypothetical problem becomes a reality — About a year ago, I wrote a blog post mentioning that Medium should offer a UI that allows authors to set a permanent and dynamic footer for their blogs. For example, at the bottom of my posts, I like to include the following lines. Upgrade your free Medium membership and…

Messaging Vs. Injection (Manifest Version 3) — If you read, Add A Content Script to Your Chrome Extension (Part I), you’ll remember how to add a content script to your Chrome extension by referencing it in your manifest.json file. This allows you to add a script that gets run whenever the webpage loads. While we were able…