Forgotten Javascript Every once in a while I get reminded of some dark corner of Javascript even though I’m developing with it every day. I give a lot of JS coding interviews and every once in a while something comes up that I hadn’t anticipated in the questions that I usually ask. Recently someone tried to solve one of my…

Micro thing-uses Hello friends. I’m still writing code every day, believe it or not. I’m back in startup land. Away from big tech land mostly. Seeing both sides of the coin has been helping me have some insights I didn’t have before on the open-source adoption of technologies that trickle down from big organizations. In the past I have mostly…

Editing Javascript One of the things I heard over and over again when I first started doing large applications with Javascript was “which IDE do you use?”. At the time I was using Visual Studio. Believe it or not, ancient Visual Studio had pretty good debugging capabilities with Internet Explorer. Everyone knows now that duo did not last. There was…

Front-end trends The last few years have seen an incredible acceleration in the JS and general front-end ecosystem. However, the more things change, the more that they stay the same. The general problem that the Web is solving is still the promise of write-once run most places in some compatible way and without pre-installation. The paradigm is so strong that…

CSStem I’m trying to distill some design wisdom I’ve come across over the years doing front-end work. There’s always this phase of any project where designers have a system of styles and components in Sketch or Illustrator. Sometimes this system is ad-hoc and sometimes it’s quite premeditated and referential. Either way the system must be translated to code by developers.…

Sprint tactics versus strategy At work right now we have moved from a one week sprint to a two week sprint. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the beginning. The idea was that we spent a lot of the time as a percentage of the work week doing sprint planning and retrospectives. We thought that a two week…

React Native I’ve started a major React Native app recently after doing a bunch of “regular” react stuff. I had pretty early access to React Native when it first came out, but really didn’t check back in on it until I started using it in earnest recently. It turns out I had some preconceptions about it that aren’t really accurate…

React reactions One of my past articles commenting on the future of Web development has gotten consistent traffic in the years since I wrote it, and now I feel the need to follow it up because I think I was way off about a few things. Just to be clear up front, Reactjs is eating the Web when it comes…

Quantified blogging I’m starting to look through my blog stats after a while of not paying much attention to them. I posted the first post in over a year recently and it has only garnered two views. This basically tells me that nearly 100% of the traffic here is residual via search and maybe old Hacker News link juice. The…

Hello again I realized some time back that it has been a really long time since I wrote any blog posts. I’m trying to rectify this, but I’m not sure where to even start. I’ve been working for a large Silicon Valley tech company now for the last two years, so I’ve accumulated a lot of new knowledge working at…