
Sebastien Castiel
Developer, writer, indie hacker
🤖 He/him 📍 Montreal, QC 🗣 French, English
French developer expatriated in Montreal, I always have several side projects ongoing, and I love sharing what I learn on this blog, in talks, on Twitter , or occasionnaly in books.
I am available for contract work; I can help you if:
- you need a mentor to guide you through your frontend developer journey,
- you need an experienced frontend developer to work on a project or offer guidance,
- you or your team want to learn React & Next.js.
Latest articles
- 📄 The simplest example to understand Server Actions in Next.js (August 3, 2023)Server Actions are a new feature in Next.js. The first time I heard about them, they didn’t seem very intuitive to me. Now that I’m a bit more used to them, let me contribute to making them easier to understand.
- 📄 Intro to React Server Components and Actions with Next.js (July 3, 2023)React is living something these days. Although it was created as a client UI library, it can now be used to generate almost everything from the server. And we get a lot from this change, especially when coupled with Next.js. Let’s use Server Components and Actions to build something fun: a guestbook.
- 📄 How to give code review as a junior developer? (June 24, 2023)By focusing on learning, providing constructive feedback with a positive tone, and embracing the opportunity to contribute, junior developers can make valuable contributions to code quality and their own growth. Code reviews are essential for skill development and fostering collaboration within development teams.
- 📄 How well should I know React before applying to my first job? (June 15, 2023)A recurring question I hear from people learning React: “how do I know if I’m ready to apply to junior React developer jobs?”. Very often, they’re ready before they know.
Latest books
- 📘 Serverless Web Applications with React and Next.js (2022)A short guide to using Next.js to create full-stack applications with React, enjoying serverless features to authenticate users and use databases.
- 📘 Create your Net Worth Tracker with Kotlin (2022)I wrote a book about Kotlin to document what I learned when I discovered the language.
- 📘 A Guide to React Hooks (2021)A book I made with the content of my interactive course useEffect.dev.
- 📘 React: Développez le Front End de vos applications web et mobiles (…) (2020)A book in French teaching React to beginners.
Current projects
- ⚙️ Learn React & Next.js (2023)An online course
More info…
Learn React & Next.js is an online course to help developers knowing HTML, CSS and JavaScript take the next step and add React & Next.js to their skills.
The course’s content is based on my live workshop, and adopts the approach I suggest in my post A better learning path for React.
- ⚙️ GitHub Business Card (2022)A business card from your GitHub profile
More info…
GitHub Business Card is a fun app generating —as an image— some sort of business card from your GitHub profile. It was an experiment of generating images with Vercel’s OG library.
- ⚙️ Montreal Developer Jobs (2022)A niche job board for developers in Montreal.
More info…
Montreal Developer Jobs is a niche job board for developers in Montreal. 🇨🇦
👨🏻💻 Until companies come to post their job ads, I manually go to several company websites to get and repost them. 😅
📝 I’m putting a lot of energy into SEO, and create blog posts about the Montreal developers' ecosystem.
- ⚙️ Spliit (2022)An alternative to Splitwise, no account needed
More info…
Spliit is an alternative to Splitwise. Use it to share expenses with friends and family, without creating any account.
I built this app while I was learning Go.