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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Human Communications Are Hard

Delays and technical issues bias us against others experiencing them.

This comes from 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]

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]

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]

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]

ambition. life's work.

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not … [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]

ambition. life's work.

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act up… [more]

begin it

"Then indecision brings its own delays, 
And days are lost lamenting over lost days. 
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; 
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;… [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]

estimations and theory building

My team lead at Instructure, 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]