the megaphone

Megaphones are amazing. For nearly as long as we have organized into large groups, we have rolled materials into tubes and spoken into them to help carry our voices to the back of the audience. Wit… [more]

The Hunt Begins

Today my hunt for a new role begins in earnest. So I am dropping some thoughts and links here.

Why am I looking for a new role?

The company that I was at (Lumio) has ended in bankru… [more]

help the person next to you

What kind of man makes it through Hell Week? That’s hard to say. But I do know—generally—who won’t make it. There are a dozen types that fail: the weight-lifting meatheads who think th… [more]

Meet with me!

Come meet with me about software engineering things, career things, business things, or bike things.

If the calendar below doesn't work, it doesn't seem to love mobile devices, more]

Some Thoughts on Engineering Leaderhip

So this article started as a thread of tweets. I want to expand on it, so I am going to quote all the tweets here and the… [more]

Last Lectures

Way back in my year end review for 2021 I wrote,

As part of that effort I’ve worked to build a culture in engineerin… [more]

Book Review-How to Survive in a Science Fictional Universe

Review-How to live safely in a science fictional universe By Charles Yu

If I said the words: “Primer with daddy issues” how would that mak… [more]

Book Review-Stranger in a strange land

Review: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

As someone working in computers the slang term grok is pretty synonymous with understanding. It turns out that it originates here in Hei… [more]

What Makes a Team Lead Great?

“Well, don’t you think that you as the commander have an obligation to create a vision for your command?” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, I feel that my job as the com… [more]

Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software

This last week, I had my leadership team in town for the first time in a while for some planning meetings, and some team building^more]

Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts

This covers a bit more than a week, but it’s been wild over here. Onboarding into the company that acquired us, the whole family getting COVID (we’re all doing better thanks), and the associates qu… [more]

Cultural Homogeneity

I've been thinking about France and French culture, and why it is that a country that only recently in the broad scheme of things adopted more equal policies around gender, is also a nation whe… [more]

Disjunctive Normal Form and other fine reads

It’s another week of DHH causing waves, which probably shouldn’t be surprising (not linking because I don’t really want to provide him a larger platform). But it does highlight one of the things I … [more]

Book Review-A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

Review: A million miles in a thousand years

This was a fun one. It’s nominally cycling and philosophy and discussions of story so you know it’s going to be one I like.^more]

Book Review-Getting to Yes

Review: Getting to Yes By Roger Fisher and William Ury

This is a quick read with some really good insights into negotiating that isn’t focused on tricks or manipulative tactics.

It em… [more]

Book Review-Aloha Rodeo-Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West

Review: Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West by David Wolman and Julian Smith

Strap yourself in for a story where co… [more]

Book Review-The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaimon

I have a mixed experience with Neil Gaiman's work. Not because he isn’t a brilliant story teller, because he is. It’s more a conte… [more]

Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership

There are moments where the lightbulb comes on for you and things that have been bouncing on the tip of your brain just drop into place. This week I had one of those. And it was about why people le… [more]

Human Communications Are Hard

Delays and technical issues bias us against others experiencing them.

This comes from more]

Why weird team names make sense

I've managed teams named, among other things, Python-Brug, and Banpo. Named for bridges in different cities, while we worked on a product named Bridge. A lot of people look at those names and t… [more]

Some thoughts inspired by "Toward peer review as a group engagement"

These are rough thoughts and should be taken as such. Think of them more as the interesting points that deserve thought in a context that the author of the paper (Andrea Bonaccorsi) was not specifi… [more]

Lumio UtahJS Conf 2022

Welcome!

I've been at Lumio for a few months now (ok fine 8 months) and I am looking for more people to join our rapidly expanding team. Check out the jobs, and more information about … [more]

Antisemitism ends with us

In 1096 the crusaders, Christian religious warrior pilgrims, set out for Jerusalem. Their cause was nominally to protect their Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters from the encroaching Islamic emp… [more]

2021: Year in Review

It has been quite the year!

As the pandemic has been dragging on, ramping up, slowing down, generally continuing to drag on.

Thoughts

I am excited for 2022.

2022! How did … [more]

Encourage teams to take risks

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

— Abraham Maslow

This last Sunday we went on a light hik… [more]

2020: A year

This has been a crazy year, but honestly an exciting one for me and my family. We've lived through multiple natural disasters, moved, changed jobs, survived a pandemic, had a new baby join us, and … [more]

A Simple QR Code Based System for Organizing Your Boxes

Recently we had our second child, and that meant digging through a bunch of boxes in the basement to find leftover baby clothes and gear. After not being able to find a few things we were pretty … [more]

Tech Things I read in 2018

This is going to be a pretty straightforward list of what tech related reading I did this year. It doesn’t include hundreds of blog posts and forum discussion. I’ll break it into two ca… [more]

Neptune (Gremlin) Local Dev Setup

I am playing with some graph databases right now, for a fun project I may write about later. When I first started out I was using Neo4j, which has an excellent local development story, a lovely… [more]

Direct Feedback

Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,&rd… [more]

On Bikesheds

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from… [more]

Vetting Information you read on the internet

Hi friends!

I realized that because of the certain set of skills I have been honing at work for the last decade I have some quick ways of vetting websites for content accuracy that the averag… [more]

design and the internet as ephemera

Hang tight... this is going to get a little esoteric.

The expirement really begins with three realizations. 1) That no one seems to agree on the direction that previous and next should be i… [more]

The right Tools for the right job

Last week I did a bit of programming for Game Of Codes in my "free" time which lead me to a couple of interesting observations.

1. Number of passing t… [more]

Office Hours

If you hadn’t noticed from this post and the last one... I am feeling grateful and like I need to give back to the community a bit. So while Hack Night SLC is ramping back up I thought it would… [more]

Jumping on the AMA bandwagon

Today I am at React Rally in SLC and after a particularly inspiring talk by Preethi Kasireddy I created an Ask Me … [more]

First Impressions: Redux/Flow

I am trying to write more and more quickly... so this is just a few quick thoughts from learning flow and redux right now for a new project I just switched to at work.

First, I love the the… [more]

So I got Scammed on Amazon

A couple of weeks ago I fell for scam in the amazon marketplace. Yep me. It was a clever one and not one I have seen written about so I am writing about it.

The Setup

I was in … [more]

monument

Over the past several years I’ve been working on a new application framework for nodejs. Monument is currently on it’s second major release.

What is Monument

Monument is fo… [more]

Critiques and Code Reviews

This is another of my attempts to clear out my drafts folder. I started writing it on 3 August 2011 (So long ago!). Still seems relevant.

Let’s talk about critiques, or as engi… [more]

So you Studied History and You're a Conservative... I am Sorry.

I started writing this in July of 2015 and never got around to publishing it. Now to clean out my drafts folder, and to get back in the habit of publishing here it is!

So you studied… [more]

Let's talk about Boot camps

So the giant article I’ve been planning to write from what I learned prepping for that talk I gave on being senior<… [more]

Language Drift and finding code beautiful

I hate javascript Class. I like semicolons. This puts me in a specific group of developers who write js. It puts me at odds with many in the Eternal War of the Semicolon.

As I was driving int… [more]

Death to Jquery

Yesterday I presented ’Death to jQuery’ at Pandamonium, our internal Tech Conference at Instructure, because honestly it’s time.

jQuery was critical to the development of th… [more]

Being Senior Part 1- the books and data

This is just a quick post to throw up the books I quoted from and a link to the data for anyone who attended my presentation at Utah JS Conference 2016 today. I am putting down my thoughts in a lon… [more]

Seeing and Speaking

I was reading this wonderful article from ia and it occurred to me that jargon and seeing are related to each other.

We know from resear… [more]

Getting Lost and Happiness

On the one hand, we are hard-wired to focus more on negative things. But at the same time, we are also all hard-wired to be seeking a sense of happiness and the desire to flourish,… [more]

Io: the language, not the moon

This is the first in the Seven Languages series of posts and covers the Io language, a small prototypal language.

Let’s get this out of the way righ… [more]

mourning

If I do this right then I will likely offend everyone, and then gently touch hearts so that we can all see eye to eye and heart to heart.

I am deeply deeply saddened by the news of the death… [more]

estimations and theory building

My team lead at Instructure, more]

reducing noise

Noise is everywhere in our lives. From commercials, to billboards, to a new crying infant, it is literally everywhere. Some of it is good noise. Some of it is distracting us from the things we want… [more]

:hover should be dead

:hover’s days are numbered. It has little time left in this world.

I am serious.

Here are the main reasons why:

• It doesn’t exist on touch… [more]

2015: in review

It is said that change is the only constant and that certainly proved true this year around here in 2015. I started the year working as a Front End Stack team (core team) member for the LDS Church … [more]

Learning the Trade

I thought I would throw together a list of resources I have found interesting and useful when it comes to building the internet. This is by no means exhaustive and will be updated over time as I fi… [more]

Details. Details. Details.

A few days ago my wife and I had dinner at a restaurant in Salt Lake City. The food is d… [more]

Biology and CSS

I am the average height of my grandfather’s generation. I have brown hair, that is rapidly going gray even at the ripe old age of 31. I have blue eyes and olive skin.

Now that you know … [more]

Thoughts on Components and stuff

TLDR: Create small shared granular components for everything, and a "view" is just an ordered collection of components.

Warning: this is rambly and mostly a brain dump. Read on...

C… [more]

Design Tools are Broken

To code or not to code? I try to push all my friends studying design to learn to code. It can only help them be better designers.

But this isn't an article about that. This is an article … [more]

On To New Horizons

"Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow." - Juliet (William Shakespeare)

For the last three and a half years I’ve been work… [more]

The Problem of Over Communication

Just like under-communicating over-communicating poses a serious problem to organizations. Before you read this and immediately write it off as just another rant, think about it. How often do you r… [more]

Modules not Globals

Often newer JS developers ask when they should turn something into a standalone module. When should that function turn into its own file? There are lots of things we could talk about with component… [more]

REST vs. RPC and a mention of HATEOS

This is a modified and expanded version of an email I sent a few days ago, here for public consumption.

So RPC is great, right? I need to do X to my data so I’ll just make an endpoint c… [more]

Confidence Without Ego

When I was young I thought humility was placing yourself below other people. To believe that they were better than me. To subserviate myself to their opinions and requests. I thought of the stereot… [more]

Line-Height... lineheight... line-height

Consider this a Public Service Agreement: There is a bug loose in the internet. It’s a subtle bug but so far every browser I have checked has some variation of this bug.

So what is this… [more]

Approaching CSS the OO Way

In an interview somewhere in the web development industry:

"Hey, have you heard of CSS?"

Oh yeah! Totally... it’s that stuff that designers write right? You know it makes things p… [more]

Toward a More Responsive Future

Let’s face it, ultimately the ideal solution for responsive images does not exists yet. Honestly, I am not sure that browser makers really have a dog in this fight so it will likely be a whil… [more]

There is a Right Way

I grew up working with power tools. I think I was 9 the first time I used a router. As a family we were making mancala boards for christmas presents for family and friends. The noise was intense, t… [more]

Don't Call Me. I'll Call You. Single Request Responsive Images

We’ve been talking about responsive design around the office a lot lately. It’s kind of a big deal these days. The holy grail seems to be responsive images, or a system that allows you … [more]

11

Today on the 10 year anniversary of September 11th I thought I would reminisce about my memories from that day, far from New York City. I am working to compile my families’ stories and may ex… [more]

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started to… [more]

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started to… [more]

Current Projects Update

I realized tonight that I have a whole bunch of projects lying around that aren't mentioned anywhere here on designfrontier. So to remedy that I decided to put together this quick article.

more]

Now Serving: Obsolescence

This article is part of a series, “Now Serving,” that takes a look at the changes in design, and consumer culture, that are happening right now.

“We have advanced technologi… [more]

Trust and the Box

Last Friday I was in Historic Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center(jsc) listening to Milt Heflin, one of jsc’s Associate Directors, describe some of the history that happened … [more]

A Tale of Two Cookies: Securing ColdFusion Session Cookies

Recently at work we went through a security review. It was a great learning experience to have outside contractors try and break into the web application. Found several things that I didn't expect … [more]

Relaunch of DesignFrontier

So here it is! After having worked for many hours, it's official. The redesign process has been exciting. Creating new features in new ways has been a blast.

Is it done? Far from it. I am sti… [more]