Last weekly roundup for this year - fair warning: it's a bit of a ramble danaciocan.com/weekly-round... Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

really do not recommend the "razorblade throat" variants of COVID going round atm - does exactly what it says on the tin and is extremely unpleasant. 0/10.

Fascinating article by @charity.wtf about hierarchy in engineering charity.wtf/2022/09/23/t... I took a step "down" recently (from Staff to Senior) because I was no longer experiencing joy at work (I am again now!) and this article resonated deeply with me. Definitely worth a read

I just completed "Trash Compactor" - Day 6 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/6 That was harder than it should have been - I'm tired

The next weekly roundup is out. Have a lovely weekend everyone! danaciocan.com/weekly-round...

Day 5 of #adventofcode done! It's so much more fun having a buddy to chat about it with 😊

Day 4 of #adventofcode all wrapped up

Blimey, I never knew there were this many Dev advent calendars: adrianroselli.com/2025/12/web-... 🤯

interesting news this - bun.com/blog/bun-joi...

Did part 1 of day 3 of #adventofcode this morning before work. Looked at part 2 and immediately didn't like Advent of Code any more

Spilled tea over my mechanical keyboard and now the down arrow switch is stuck 🫠 I feel conflicted because while I really like this keyboard in many ways, it has caused me nothing but trouble because its switches keep doing stuff like this even without tea. So maybe it's time to get a new one

Did part 1 of day 2 of #adventofcode this morning before work. Have some ideas for how to do part 2 but not counting my chickens after yesterday 😆

I've completed "Secret Entrance" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

Did part 1 of day 1 of #adventofcode this morning before work and have a pretty good idea of how to do part 2 🤔

#adventofcode day! 🎄🎅☃️

I've been meaning to write about this for ages. If you are currently looking for a new role, here's what I learned from my job search this year. The market is tough and my heart goes out to you if you are going through redundancy or struggling to find work danaciocan.com/job-hunting-...

how is #adventofcode2025 already upon us?? 🫠

Test-driven development saved me today - I've been implementing a React component that's got some nuance to it and having the tests there from the get go has made it so easy to refactor and simplify. Hooray for TDD!

I'm thinking of doing "weekly roundups" on my blog where I talk about all the things I learned in the previous week - I just think it would be neat to have a bit of a log and if someone else can learn from it too, even better!

huh - did not know there was a JSX-enabled version of markdown. I look forward to exploring what that will allow me to do...

Something reminded me of the alternatives to the TODO comment - FIXME, REFACTOR, HACK, BUG etc. Does anyone still use those?

Every day another agentic framework. Kind of over it now - can I just use the tools I've only just gotten used to please?

Had a play with displaying markdown files in Next.js app router this morning - thought I'd share how I did it because it turns out, it's super easy! danaciocan.com/how-to-displ...

Doing some serious in-depth reading on Next.js' app router - any useful articles, videos or other resources you'd recommend I check out? There should be a couple of blog posts coming out of this

Always a bit scary when you propose a completely new approach for an ongoing project, but so good when the team listens and is appreciative of your ideas 😊

If you haven't read Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification" yet, I highly recommend you do - I listened to the audiobook and it was entertaining (I couldn't put it down) as well as informative. It also made me feel slightly ill - so sad to see what's happened to our beautiful internet!

Had a fantastic time at #TechMids 2025. What an event! So lovely to see so many familiar faces and I learned a lot from all the talks. Well done and thank you to the team of organisers who clearly put a LOT of love and care into it. This is why grassroots events are the best 💜

I'm heading to conf.techmids.org tomorrow and if you're based in the Midlands and work in tech, you should totally join - there are still tickets available!

Just finished 'Deceptive Patterns: Exposing the Tricks Tech Companies Use to Control You' by Harry Brignull - very illuminating book. Highly recommend anyone working for a tech company in a design, product or engineering capacity to give this a read

Wrote a blog post about code reviews: danaciocan.com/lets-talk-ab... Slowly getting back into the swing of things again 😊

Interesting... appwrite.io/blog/post/wh... I've only used TanStack Query so far but might have to have a go at TanStack Start at some point soon 🤔

I made a silly Halloween CSS art codepen codepen.io/dana-ciocan/... you might want to open it up and hover over his face 😆

I definitely feel like a JavaScript developer trying to use TypeScript a lot of the time, so doing some Total TypeScript learning today to try and improve res.cloudinary.com/total-typesc...

This seems really cool! Love the fact that web components stuff is all community-driven and it's native web tech. daverupert.com/2025/10/cust...

Super interesting article showing RSCs don't magically improve performance without some serious rearchitecting of your application: www.developerway.com/posts/react-...

I love all the new features coming to CSS the last few years but it's so hard to keep up! Glad there are videos like this to summarise it in a fun and easy to digest way 😆 www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW6G...

Some interesting announcements - love that RSCs are becoming less of a Vercel-only thing and Vite+ looks great! Though I wonder whether paid licensing will reduce adoption www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Js...

I honestly don't think I've ever seen this tag before (or I forgot - it happens!) and it sounds very handy if you've got forms that update some content on a page

I'm easing myself back into blogging. One topic I've wanted to write about for a while is fixup commits - one of those Git skills that is a real game changer. It seems finicky and weird initially, but once you get it, you'll never add a "fix typo" commit ever again! danaciocan.com/fixup-commits

Did my first talk in my new job and remembered how much I enjoy it. Might make it into a blog post 🤔

Adding this `minimumReleaseAge` setting to our pnpm repo because I am not taking any chances given what's been happening the last few weeks... pnpm.io/settings#min...

Interesting article: leadthroughmistakes.substack.com/p/when-fear-... I've worked in spaces where people have acted in this kind of way and it has silenced the folks around them. As this article explains, it doesn't have to stay this way - it is possible to change!

This was a fun but tricky challenge: cantunsee.space

Very interesting podcast about loneliness in tech leadership: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7ge...

Just attended a training session on engineering culture and haven't felt this inspired in a long time! I have missed programming feeling like a craft rather than a relentless onslaught

Wild that phishing was the cause of this week's NPM issues: socket.dev/blog/npm-aut... Scary really - can't say that I wouldn't have fallen for that...

Such a cool article on how to animate colour changes using CSS

comicss.art/comics/206/ 🤭

Well, I broke something in my third week 😅 currently busy repeating to myself “you’re not a proper engineer until you break something”

Today I actually felt useful at my new job 🎉 and I got a PR up for review just before the weekend which means I'm not going to be thinking about work until Monday - win!