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Samantha Geitz

Samantha Geitz

Tighten Alum

Article
How I (Mostly) Overcame My Fear of Public Speaking
· Samantha Geitz
At the end of last year, I set a goal for myself to speak at a handful of conferences in 2018. At the time, it had been almost two years since my last speaking engagement, and I knew that sharing some of the knowledge I’d gained was the best way to...
Article
Tighten Dev Battle 2: Four Brains. Two Screens. One Native App.
· Samantha Geitz
About a year ago, we streamed the inaugural Tighten Dev Battle, during which senior developers Samantha Geitz...
Article
A Look at the Tighten Crew's Battlestations
· Samantha Geitz
Tighten is a 100% remote company, and one of the best parts about working from home is that you're able to set up your office however you'd like. Today, we thought we'd give you a peek into the inner sanctums of the Tighten crew...
Article
Tighten Senior Dev Battle: JavaScript Death Match
· Samantha Geitz
There are two issues that cause a bitter divide within the Tighten family: 1) The proper pronunciation of the word "gif" 2) The best JavaScript framework in the year 2017: Vue or React While we...
Article
UX Lessons Learned from a Snapchat Addiction
· Samantha Geitz
In the last few weeks, despite my inclinations to the contrary, I have become a Snapchat addict. (I have also decided to double-down on becoming a Millennial cliche by adding the term “bae” to my regular lexicon, but I digress.) In that short...
Article
Why You Should be Giving Your Developers 20% time
· Samantha Geitz
About a year ago, Tighten officially implemented a "20% time" policy for its developers. This means that, on any given week, we only bill our clients for 32 hours of developer work; for the other 8 hours, developers can work on whatever projects...
Article
You Might Not Need Redux
· Samantha Geitz
One of the best things about React is how large and vibrant its ecosystem is: there are robust libraries to help with everything from forms to HTTP requests to state management, making it far easier to build incredibly complex and scalable...
Article
Adding React Components to a Laravel Application
· Samantha Geitz
It's no secret that Vue.js is a favorite in the Laravel community, but what if you want to use React in a Laravel project? While Laravel isn't set up to use React...
Article
Caffeine Fiends: Coffee and Tea When You Work from Home
· Samantha Geitz
At Tighten, if there's anything we take as seriously as our code, it's our caffeine addictions. Because we all work from home (or our own individual offices), there's no shared, decades-old office Mr. Coffee that nobody ever cleans; we are responsible...
Article
Pair Programming at a 100% Remote Company
· Samantha Geitz
At Tighten, one of the ways we ensure high-quality work is to always try to avoid putting code into production without at least one other set of eyes reviewing it. While on single-developer projects this often comes in the form of a code review from...
Article
Tools of the Trade: Software We Love (or Tolerate) at Tighten
· Samantha Geitz
Sometimes it's easy for us to forget just how much software goes into the process of writing software. All day long, we interact with tools that are the result of thousands of hours of work from developers just like us. Above all, we expect these...
Article
React 101, Part 4: Firebase
· Samantha Geitz
Last updated 06/01/17 to use Create React App, Redux Form v6, React-Router v4, and Firebase v3. Looking for the old version of the code? Find it here...
Article
React 101, Part 3: Routing and Auth
· Samantha Geitz
Last updated 06/01/17 to use Create React App, Redux Form v6, React-Router v4, and Firebase v3. Looking for the old version of the code? Find it here...
Article
React 101, Part 2: Refactoring with Redux
· Samantha Geitz
Last updated 06/01/17 to use Create React App, Redux Form v6, React-Router v4, and Firebase v3. Looking for the old version of the code? Find it here...
Article
React 101, Part 1: Building a GIF search engine
· Samantha Geitz
Last updated 06/01/17 to use Create React App, Redux Form v6, React-Router v4, and Firebase v3. Looking for the old version of the code? Find it here...
Article
Unpacking Webpack

Taking your first steps toward a new paradigm in build processes

· Samantha Geitz
Introduction You might have heard some of the buzz around Webpack in the last few months. If you’re anything like me, you probably took one look at it, decided not to bother with its hipster black...