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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

CSS Only Partial Width Borders

A design that I was recently implementing required a partial width underline for some headings and a partial height border as a divider between two elements.

But I didn’t want to add any ex… [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]

Seven Languages

A few weeks ago we started a book club at work and we are running through more]

safe-shrinkwrap: for all your shrinkwrapping needs

One of the challenges that we have had in the recent past at work is with dependencies that don’t lock down their dependencies well. A lot of this probably rises from a misunderstanding of 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]

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]

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]

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]

Audio and Old Androids

I just got done working on a project that involved the use of the audio tag (with flash fallback for IE) and thought I would share a couple of the issues that we ran into in working on it, and how … [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]

Short Circuit and the Javascript IF Statement

A quick javascript tip that lets you eliminate small IF statements

Ok so it’s not really that kind of Short Circuit, though it is almost as cool. In javascript, as in many programming l… [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]

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]