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]

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]

Software Engineer vs. Software Developer

What is the difference between a Software Engineer and a Software Developer? Or is there a difference?

So I've been building websites and web apps since we used to be called Web Masters.… [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]

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]

you’re a journeyman

"The secret is never forgetting that you’re a journeyman actor and that nothing is your final thing, nothing is your greatest thing, nothing is your worst thing. I still consider … [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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