Scott Bolinger

Adventures in Software Engineering

  • AI Agents

    I’ve been working with AI agents a lot lately. Some people are confused what an agent really is, here’s how I think about it. At its most basic, an agent is an LLM prompt and a set of tools it can call autonomously. The agent has instructions, like “You are a helpful support representative” and…

  • Challenges of AI in production

    Building a demo app with an LLM is easy, because you don’t need it to work perfectly. What happens when it goes to production and 10-20% of the time the LLM hallucinates or provides an incorrect response? As we’ve seen in the headlines, this is unacceptable. LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic, meaning they can give…

  • Everything I’ve Learned Building an AI App

    From my experience using Open AI to build an AI Assistant, hopefully it’s helpful! First, the main concepts of AI and LLMs, in plain english. There’s a lot of complicated terms about LLMs like memory, agents, threads, system prompts, functions, embedding, tools, etc. I was super confused about this at first. It’s actually very simple,…

  • A Brand New WooCommerce Checkout Experience

    I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on at GoDaddy for the past several months: a super fast, mobile focused, headless checkout for WooCommerce. This is not a new checkout page template, it’s a completely new experience built from scratch to load faster and help customers checkout faster, especially on mobile. Modern eCommerce checkouts…

  • Cypress Testing Tricks

    I’m currently building an eCommerce checkout app, and I’m using Cypress for end to end testing. I ran into some issues and learned some tricks I’ll share with you here. If you aren’t familiar with the term e2e, it means testing the whole app from the user perspective. In my case, that would be add…

  • Type Safety for GraphQL Data

    When using a GraphQL client like urql, one of the issues you may run into is that your query and mutation responses are not typed. For example, let’s say we have a cart query: When we use this query, it would be nice to see autocompletion in our editor, as well as errors if we…

  • Custom React Hooks

    When you are building a component library, or working on a large project, one of the issues you will run into is having too much logic in your components. If your component starts to look like this, it’s time to create some custom hooks: If you have multiple components using state and effects in a…

  • The Best Style API for Reusable React Components

    When creating reusable React Components, either in a library or for your own use, you need a flexible way to style your components. There are 2 parts to this, what library or style system should you use, and then how do you implement that? Regarding the what style system to use, you have a lot…

  • Don’t Make Black Box React Components

    When building reusable React components, it’s tempting to make black boxes. That would be something like this: At first glance, this looks fine. You have a specific use-case for this component, you got a design and it is used in a single place, and it works perfectly for that. You built it in a way…

  • 7 Thoughts From 7 Years of Headless WordPress Development

    I’ve been working with headless WordPress for about 7 years now, first at AppPresser working on mobile apps, and now at GoDaddy working with Ecommerce. The things I’ve learned can’t be distilled into one blog post, but these are the most important ideas that can trip you up when starting a new project. wtf is…