Team! A Module For Teams!

Recently I found myself with some time on my hands... so I wrote a simple module for managing engineering team member information in automation projects.

Basically I was working on some auto… [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Making the world more beautiful

Prompt: "You are tasked with making the world most beautiful. Where do you start?"

My first reaction is that I start with furniture. I believe that our perception of quality and beauty, whic… [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

: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]

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]

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]

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]

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]