Mensur Duraković
I once found out about a decision in a very ugly way. I exported a spreadsheet to CSV, imported it into a project, and handed it to my AI agent to build me a slide out of the data. The slide came back wrong. Not broken, just wrong: the numbers on it did not match the plan our whole group had agreed on weeks earlier. My first thought was that I had messed up the import. My second thought was that…
The page that talked me into this was ByteDance's launch. You open it and there is no page, just video: full-bleed, edge to edge, a fisheye shot of a guy roaring on a beach volleyball court, with the nav floating on top of it and nothing else competing. I closed the tab and went back to it twice, which is usually my signal that something is working on me. My own blog home page, meanwhile, was a…
Every few months the AI tooling scene names a new way of working. Prompt engineering . Vibe coding . Context engineering. Agentic workflows . Each one arrives with a manifesto, a wave of LinkedIn posts, and a quiet death about two hype cycles later. So when I say I spent an afternoon doing "loop engineering" on my own blog, I understand the eye roll. But I think, loop engineering is the one that…
This is something I didn't understand until I became a manager, and I wish I had known it at the start of my career. When you proactively follow up with your manager, when you send a quick message saying "hey, this is done," they feel a small wave of satisfaction and relief. Something they were carrying just got resolved, and they subconsciously anchor that feeling to you. You become the person…
I've been on Ghost for years and, honestly, it's a lovely product. The editor is clean, the themes are nice, and it just works. But there was one thing I couldn't get past. I don't run one blog, I run two. This one, and my fiancée's over at crueltyfreebiologist.com , where she writes about cruelty-free beauty and the science behind it. Two blogs mean two of everything. And paying per-site SaaS…
I started my first software engineering job as a student in my last college year, in August 2010. Years passed by, and since the 7th year of my work, I have always wanted to write this article. Today is August 2025, which marks 10 years of my professional journey. As George Carlin says: 10 sounds official, 10 sounds important! 10 is the basis of a decimal system. It's a decade, it's a…
When making your React application accessible in multiple languages, i18next and its React companion library react-i18next offer a very robust set of features and tools. The libraries work together very well to offer specialized React hooks and components that allow internationalization simply and effectively. In this article, I will discuss some of the advanced features available. This article…
I've worked in startups, midsize companies, and big corporations. Through my experience, I realized that technical skills are just one part of what makes a great engineer. The human element - how engineers approach problems, interact with team members, handle pressure, and maintain professional growth - often determines their true impact. That human element reminds me of some football players.…
Every software engineer hits that familiar barrier. You've mastered your daily tasks, learned the codebase, and become a reliable team member. Yet something's missing. That nagging feeling that you could be doing more, achieving more, and growing faster. I recently had this exact conversation with a friend who was struggling with the old question: What's next? After the initial learning curve…
Many years ago I played League of Legends for about 2-3 years. If you have ever played it as well, you know that there is a champion called Caitlyn. Caitlyn is straightforward to play but hard to master. You need to use her abilities aggressively early in the game otherwise mid game you will have a hard time. I would compare coding in React with playing Caitlyn. It's simple, every developer who…
As a junior engineer, I had that classic arrogance many of us start with - spitting at any code I hadn't written myself. I'd scroll through the codebase, commenting about the "idiots" who'd created this "legacy mess" I now had to maintain. The complaints about fixing someone else's mistakes were constant. I was young, overconfident, and utterly wrong. This reality check came while working for a…
As another year draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on what has been one of the most transformative periods of my life. While 2024 brought its share of challenges, it also delivered meaningful personal and professional progress that I'll carry forward into the new year. One of my proudest achievements this year was maintaining a consistent writing practice. I published 24 articles,…
In the world of AI-powered development tools, one question is currently a hot topic on tech forums and subreddits: AI-powered IDEs Like many skeptical software engineers, I initially brushed off Cursor IDE as just another AI coding tool. Introduced to it by a colleague in October 2023, but it just didn't stick with me. After more than a year, a member of my team mentioned it a few months ago and I…
Let's say we're building an employee profile page. When someone visits a profile, three key things need to happen: We need to grab their data from our backend (things like name, bio, profile pic) While that data is loading, we should show a nice loading spinner or skeleton screen as nobody likes a blank page. We want to display a little green dot or "Online" status if they have been active in the…
In the mid-1990s, the web rapidly evolved, and the need for a more dynamic and interactive browsing experience became increasingly apparent. Netscape, the company behind the popular Mosaic web browser, recognized this shift and wanted to stay ahead of the curve. Brendan Eich was then a young programmer with a background in programming languages and compilers. Eich's task was to create a new…