Kyle Shevlin

Hi, I'm Kyle Shevlin, founder and lead software engineer of Agathist, a software development firm that specializes web & mobile applications built with React , React Native , Astro and TypeScript .

I am also a writer, speaker and coding instructor. This is my personal site where I share all the content I create.

I primarily write articles and create courses, focusing on breaking software concepts down to their fundamentals. Check out one of my posts or courses (or all of them). If you like what you read, then sign up for my newsletter, too.

If you're looking to hire me and my team, send an email to kyle@agath.ist. If you need to reach me regarding something else, then my personal email is the best way to do so.

Enjoy your time here and thank you.

Recent Posts

1. Tailwind “Minimum Full Height” Layout

   I've been using Tailwind CSS on a lot of projects lately. Almost all my layouts for these projects are some version of the "minimum full height" layout, and I wanted to quickly show you how I do that with Tailwind.

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   Tags

   TailwindCSS
2. Make Checkpoint

   aka How a Makefile Improves my Side Projects

   Learn how to create a simple Makefile to quickly create a "checkpoint" in your Git history when you are rapidly prototyping.

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   Tags

   ProductivityPrototypingScripts
3. Agathist VSCode Themes

   I created a VSCode theme inspired by Agathist's brand colors and released it as a VSCode Extension.

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   Tags

   VSCode
4. Two Types of Composition

   Not only is "composition" a confusing word, but there is more than one way to do it. Let's break those ways down into two types and learn about "nesting composition" versus "merging composition".

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   Tags

   JavaScriptTypeScriptSoftware Engineering
5. Agathist Q&A

   You might have noticed a few new "ads" around here recently for something called Agathist. Let me tell you what that is all about in a (hopefully) fun self-directed Q&A.

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   Tags

   Career
6. No Outer margin

   It is an anti-pattern to add margin to the outermost element of a component. It breaks encapsulation and makes components difficult to reuse. Let's learn what to do instead.

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   Tags

   ReactCSSReusabilityAnti-patterns
7. Type TODO

   In TypeScript, sometimes any is our best option, but we can go a step further and give ourselves a little more signal than that.

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   Tags

   TypeScript
8. Wrangling Tuple Types

   TypeScript doesn't know whether you're returning an array or a tuple from a function, so let's learn a couple ways we can fix that problem.

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   Tags

   ReactTypeScript
9. UI Composition

   AKA taking a step back to take a step forward

   Often we run into tricky UI situations as a result of overloading an element with styling responsibilities. We can solve this problem by separating the responsibilities and re-composing the individual components.

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   Tags

   React
10. Typescript Prevents Bad Things... and Good Things

    TypeScript is great at preventing bad things from happening, but it can prevent us from having some good things, too. When writing the types for functionality is onerously more difficult than writing the functionality itself, we might miss out on the good things that could have been.

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    Tags

    ReactJavaScriptTypeScript