I'm Barns! 👋

So officially my name is Barnaby Anderson, but everyone calls me Barns. I invite you to do so too! I’m originally from London and live in Poland with my wife and kids.

I’m a full stack engineer with my recent experience centered around TypeScript and React however I am a great believer in understanding things from first principles. We are pretty much trying to do the same things with all languages it’s just a matter of naming and syntax.

I’m really interested in Developer Experience (DX) and automating everything where possible. Life is too short concentrate on things that can be automated.

I’ve been coding full-time since 2010 after a previous life as an aspiring professional rugby player. I’ve always loved music and try and keep playing saxophone and electronics.

There are two things that I know to really improve one’s technical knowledge, skills and also job prospects in software engineering. These are pet projects and contributing to Open Source Software (OSS).

The idea of my blog is to document my journey into doing more of both. So far I’ve got a very basic chmod calculator site that I did for fun over a couple of evenings some time ago and one pull request approval for Storybook for React Native.

The two pet projects I have in mind are centered around the idea of a community driven knowledge sharing site. One for bicycle component compatibility and the other for programming language feature comparison.

On the OSS front I’m keen to contribute more to Storybook for React Native but also thinking about what else would be good to contribute to.