npmx and the open source mindset
Thoughts on my journey contributing to npmx over the past month. The future of open source is bright.
Jonathan Yeong
Hey there, I'm Jono Yeong 👋. I'm a Staff Software Engineer from Australia currently based in Canada. This blog is a collection of notes on topics that I find interesting and exciting.
Latest posts
Using Val.town as a webhook middleware
My latest obsession has been optimising webhook events from Ghost to Netlify. I needed a way to filter out large payloads sent to Netlify. Using Val.town as a webhook middleware, I can strip payloads and skip triggering builds for certain posts.
Year in Review: 2025
My 2025 year in review. This was a year of peaks and valleys. I touch on what I've accomplished, my favourite lists this year, and my theme for next year.
Lessons I learnt from my first year of building a DevEx Team
With seemingly every company adopting AI, the need for good DevEx is greater than ever. I've spent all of 2025 building a DevEx team and I have some thoughts around the need for DevEx, ownership, product thinking, and hiring.
Loading Ghost CMS posts with Astro Content Collections
A guide to how I created a custom Astro content collection loader to fetch content from Ghost CMS and load them alongside my existing markdown files
Mobile-Friendly Headless CMS's with Astro
I loved my Obsidian blog workflow, but I wanted a better mobile publishing workflow. To change things up, I tested four headless CMSs with Astro: Sanity, Ghost, TinaCMS, and PagesCMS. In the end, I chose Ghost. Here's why I chose it, and where it falls short.
Redesigning my site: version 3
A behind-the-scenes look at redesigning my personal site (v3). I share my design goals, evolution through multiple iterations, and key technical changes.
2024 Recapped
In this post, I share my theme of this year: independence, how I tracked against my goals, and future plans.
Building Design Gut Instinct
A guide to building your design gut instinct. And why having this instinct is useful.
(Re)Building a reading habit
Tips on how to build a reading habit: make reading a priority, figure out your reading vibe, prep your brain then check your brain, and finally curate your reading list.
Articles I Enjoyed #1
Sharing some articles that I've enjoyed reading recently
Personal Productivity Handbook
My guide to personal productivity, including a lesson to not prematurely optimise, as well as an explanation of my tools and systems.
Setting up dev containers in Rails
Development containers are an alternative to local development. You can have a dev ready environment running in minutes. Here's how we can set one up in Rails, issues I ran into along the way, and my initial thoughts.
30 Days of Posts Retrospective
It's the end of my 30 days of post challenge and I wanted to write a retrospective
Reframing Imposter Syndrome
I had a bad bout of imposter syndrome a few days ago. I talked to a coach who helped reframe my anxiety.
Dynamic Nested Forms with Rails and Stimulus
A guide on dynamically adding nested form elements using Stimulus.js and Rails. We'll cover the html and JS changes needed, as well as common gotchas.
Infrastructure 101: What is a server?
Beginning my infrastructure journey from the very basics. Let's talk about servers.
How to Effectively Pair Program
Pair programming is a powerful way to solve problems. It might not be for everyone, but here are some ways to make it more effective.
Moving Slow to Move Fast
Kelsey Hightower dropping knowledge bombs that I absolutely resonate with
Terraform magic
I'm learning about Terraform and it's all magic to me
Beginning my Developer Experience journey
In this post, I share my definition of Developer experience, how we measure it, and what we measure, as well as a note on survey building
Tools I use daily as a solo dev
All the tools that I use on a daily basis as a solo dev
Slow productivity framework
Sharing my journey from toxic productivity to embracing the Slow Productivity framework
Nested forms in Rails
Quick tutorial on how to build nested forms in Rails
Tina CMS: a retrospective
A retrospective on trying to implement Tina CMS into my workflow
Fixing missing Ruby versions in asdf
TIL: how to fix missing Ruby versions in asdf
Advice for Effective Developers
In this post, I share advice that has made me a better developer. I was inspired to write down my thoughts after a recent SyntaxFM podcast, 11 habits of highly effective developers.
Using Github Actions to fetch content
My content lives in a private repository separated from the main website repository. It got annoying to manually keep changes in sync. Instead, I used Github Actions to automate publishing posts.
Scheduling Posts with AstroJS
Quick demo on how I schedule posts with AstroJS
Writing blog posts with Obsidian
My end to end writing workflow for my blog using Obsidian as the main editor. From how I setup Obsidian for writing, image management, and automating git pushes.
Making a custom kebab case method for pretty URLs
I was surprised that Rails and Ruby didn't have a built in kebab case method. Adding a gem seemed overkill for me. So I created a custom method to serve pretty URLs.
30 Days of Posts
I was inspired to try writing a daily blog post for 30 days
You know what they say about assumptions
I should know better then to assume my code works
What I missed about Ruby
I had a 2 year break from Ruby, and I have so many things that I missed and need to catch up on
Taking charge of my onboarding: my personal checklist
My onboarding checklist that I've been using over the past few jobs to help give me structure when I've recently joined a company
Tools I Use: Excalidraw
Sharing my favourite whiteboarding tool
What is Zeitwerk?
A note on Zeitwerk, a code loader for Ruby.
What I look for in a company
A list of red and green flags that I look for when interviewing at a company
Burnout is a sneaky bugger
Burnout sucks, and I found it hard to spot when I was going through it
Fixing a Timezone bug on my blog
I had a bug on my blog where the published date displayed was different then the published date I added in my markdown. It came down to a timezone issue!
Adding Topics (aka tags) in Astro
A short how to guide on adding topics to your Astro site. Part of Virtual Coffee Build in Public challenge
What is the right amount of testing?
My opinions on good defaults to keep in mind when trying to understand the right amount of testing
Developer productivity with Github Codespaces
My journey into improving my development workflow
Learning about API First Design
Learning note on what API First design is and why you'd use it
Redesigning my Blog: 2023
Just gave my blog a fresh new look for 2023! Switching from SvelteKit to Astro - read on to find out why!
Learning about Open API
Learning note on what Open API is and what it's used for
Redesigning my Blog: 2021
A walkthrough of how this site is built! From the inception to switching it on in production
Excerpts with Eleventy
A tutorial on getting excerpts into 11ty.
How to setup CI with Phoenix and Github Actions
Tutorial on getting CI set up with Phoenix and Github Actions. Tests are automatically run anytime you push a commit to Github.
Building a blog with Phoenix: Getting started
The first installment of a tutorial to get a blog up and running with Phoenix. Inspired by the Ruby on Rails tutorails on getting a blog running