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…

Scripting Pure Data Graphical programming languages like PD are great for high level tweaking and live modding of programs, but they all seem to suffer from the problem where things get tedious when building some simple low-level constructs like loops or building data structures. Pure Data has always been extensible by creating your own externals in C, but there is…

BASH shell navigation hacks I love the shell for the most part. Modern systems ship with the fantastic (for the most part) BASH shell, which includes tab completion, sophisticated line editing modes and many nice usability features (try using a shell without history or line editing support and see what a difference this makes). There are still some places where…

The Zen of Pure Data I have been mulling over the idea of writing a guide for Pure Data aimed at developers proficient in at least one other more mainstream programming language. Pure Data is so different than many other programming environments, yet its utility is such that I keep coming back to it despite the difficulties in managing code…

Goodbye Posterous – a migration story Many of you know (or should know, if you have anything still on Posterous!) that Posterous is shutting its doors following its acquisition by Twitter. I was one of the first Posterous users in 2008, and they even gave me many more blogs than were usually allowed on the service at the time. Heady…