Hello! 👋 My name’s Tobias Davis. I’ve built software applications for over a decade and write about things I’ve learned along the way, like:
- Always be documenting - A company knowledge base is a strong indicator of good company health.
- Tests should be automatically run on all pull requests. Here’s how to do it in Bitbucket Pipelines.
- Systematically designed APIs are critical, here’s how I use JSON:API to do it (but don’t bikeshed).
What is software? How should we create and maintain it? How does it impact real people? I’m still exploring those ideas.
I’ve started a curated Github stars list of tools I use in my normal development cycle. (Ping me if it gets to be a bit old.)
You can look at most of the code I’ve written on Github or on npm, but some highlights I’m excited about:
- Quite a few MongoDB things, like this locally-running Data API and an in-memory version for testing, plus a nice client for the Data API.
- The AWS v4 signature test suite so that I could make a smaller request signing library.
- A top-of-window progress bar for Svelte.
- A small collection of email tools that I wrote to make it easier to work with IMAP.
- JS library to take a JSON schema and turn it to Markdown, for auto-generation of human-readable specs.
Other assorted things I’m involved with:
- HunchJS, compiled search for your static Markdown files.
- The OpenMergeAPI specifications, which I use to teach API design.
- The Very Open License is for those who want something even simpler and less restrictive than the MIT license but who are uncomfortable with “The Swears” in the WTFPL.
- Specifications for a signed tar file for easily passing around cryptographically secure file bundles.
- The SDMP was my attempt at making the internet a better, more secure place.