I’ve got three posts in my brain backlog now about more complex software concepts showing up in UI work. Here’s the first! I’ve been waiting a long time to use a bitwise operator in “real world” JavaScript – like 5-6 years – and the opportunity finally …
I’ve been reading two texts this week. Side-by-side they offer another reveal of the tragic double standard of black and white life in our America. That truth descends like an ashy film upon reaching 90 pages into Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s memoir about creating Nike. On the one hand: a …
I think a lot about Hillel Wayne’s blog post INSTRUCTIVE AND PERSUASIVE EXAMPLES: an interpolative critique of a best practice article on unit testing. Wayne argues that “instructive” examples don’t make a reader care. In contrast, we should labor harder to craft “persuasive” examples that attempt …
Bugs reveal. I look, observe. I learn things. I just experienced another one. The customer can’t publish. Ensue existential how come??? After poking around I noticed our client code was deleting a parent entity too eagerly during a fail case while create operations were in flight for …
This weekend I spotted Julia Evans posting tips about debugging – of course a zine quickly followed. This resonated deeeply because it touches on one aspect of debugging that I often struggle with. It’s comforting to know this is a common kind of struggle! What Evans articulates so well …
I caught this tweet by Ruth Malan yesterday. It’s a wonderful reminder about the tension between continuous evolution and product instability in software development. But like putting “product stability” in tension with “continuous evolution” is a very (relevant) …
There are too many imports in this React component file. I’m staring down like 50 lines of imports. External libraries (React, Lodash, etc…), our own internal libraries, components files, helpers, constants. The last bothers me the most because they feel like implementation details I want hidden …
There’s always heated babbling (err…babeling) on the cyberspace to assign metaphor to our embryonic field of building digital things: writing or engineering or accretion. One thing for sure, humans have a religious proclivity to conquistador in the bikeshed when faced with terra incognita. …