Modern C# Those of you that have followed me for a while know that my first significant industry experience was with .NET. Of course my first programming experiences were with C64 BASIC and Pascal on the Mac along with college courses in C++ but it’s always those first real codebases where one cuts their teeth. Anyway, it was very modern…

Process stability and Software Engineering I’m reading some of Edward Deming’s writing and I can’t help but try to draw parallels between manufacturing fundamentals and statistical process control and the software development lifecycle. Deming was able to show scientific ways of managing hidden variables without trying to make wild guesses about systems up-front. I have seen management systems come and…

All code is legacy code I was doing some one-on-one meetings with some folks on my dev team and my colleague showed me an informal document that he was keeping. Sprinkled throughout were references to legacy code and proposals to move to different technologies. I wanted to dig into some specifics but I casually mentioned that all of our code…

Immediacy The last few years I have been going out to a festival in the Nevada desert. You can probably guess which one but it’s not really important for this discussion. One of the core tenets or “principles” of that gathering is embracing immediacy. In the context of the festival that generally manifests itself in a kind of a fractally…

Go to the H1 of the class I’m refactoring some HTML right now and it occurs to me that headings are problematic for non-frontend devs and inconsistently used at best among frontenders. When I was at Yahoo a big part of the styling philosophy revolved around Atomic CSS. These were the kind of predecessor to React’s JS-like inline style declarations.…

Simple Ubuntu Desktop with Vagrant I wanted to spin up a Linux development environment to hack on some code that needed epoll. I could have run everything in a Docker container, but I kinda wanted to be in that environment for total hackage. I thought maybe I’d just do it in a Virtualbox instance. Then I didn’t want to install…

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…