After a long time spent in management, I found myself switching back to an IC role in February. Since then, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit re-learning how to do all the things I used to do. Or…maybe not re-learning outright, but rebuilding habits and patterns that used to be automatic, but that I now have to think about. One of those patterns involved code reviews. The place I work has a bias towards large, epic-sized PRs. If it’s been a minute since I’ve been an IC, it’s been an…

While I unfortunately haven’t had a lot of time to contribute to Factor for a couple of years, I still love using it for the little random programming tasks I have to deal with day-to-day. Factor’s design makes it perfect for the kind of exploratory work that hits at the fringe of what it makes sense to automate. And on top of that, I still think Factor should be more widely used, so I like doing what little I can with what time I have to “make fetch happen”. One of my current addictions is…

For quite some time, I’ve had an appreciation for text-based tooling. Not (necessarily) for terminal-based tooling, mind—there are some meaningful benefits to using a GUI, after all—but for solutions that truly think of plaintext as their source of truth. To that end, I’ve been using a nice Python tool called jrnl for years, which makes maintaining a pure text journal really easy. All jrnl really does is to automate maintaining a simple text file in a straightforward way, and providing a few…

The best teacher I ever had on how to write and how to code was a complete charlatan hack who conned his way into Duke’s English department. No wait, hear me out: the prof (let’s call him Matt, because I’m not even entirely sure he gave us his real name) was an awful professor in most respects. He didn’t grade anything, I’m dubious he had any teaching credentials in the first place, he often didn’t even bother showing up to class at all, and, while I’m about 95% sure he had some college degree,…

Deno is a re-imagining of Node: still JavaScript for the server and command line, still based on V8, but with a drastically improved build story, simplified (hell, genuinely simple) dependencies, and a vastly improved standard library and web compatibility story. I’ve been using it on-and-off for hobby work for a couple of years now,[1] and I’ve really enjoyed playing with it. One especially unique feature of Deno is its security model. By default, Deno scripts aren’t allowed any dangerous…

I realized the other day that, while I do almost all of my development “in *nix”, I don’t actually meaningfully program in what I traditionally have thought of as “*nix” anymore. And, if things like Hacker News, Lobsters, and random dotfiles I come across on GitHub are any indication, then there are many developers like me. “I work on *nix” can mean a lot of very different things, depending on who you ask. To some, it honestly just means they’re on the command line: being in cmd.exe on…

As much as I love exploring and using weird tech for personal projects, I’m actually very conservative when it comes to using new tech in production. Yet I was an immediate, strong proponent of React Hooks the second they came out. Before Hooks, React really had two fundamentally different ways to write components: class-based, with arbitrary amounts of state; or pure components, done as simple functions, with zero state. That could be fine, but the absolutely rigid split between the two was…

Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Dogs, I thought it would be great to offer you falsehoods programmers believe about mankind’s other best friend. But since I don’t know what that is, here’s instead a version about cats. Cats would never eat your face. Cats would never eat your face while you were alive.[1] Okay, cats would sometimes eat your face while you’re alive, but my cat absolutely would not. Okay, fine. At least I will never run out of cat food. You’re kidding me. There…

Edge is dead. Yes, its shell will continue, but its rendering engine is dead, which throws Edge into the also-ran pile of WebKit/Blink wrappers. And no, I’m not thrilled. Ignoring anything else, I think EdgeHTML was a solid rendering engine, and I wish it had survived because I do believe diversity is good for the web. But I’m not nearly as upset as lots of other pundits I’m seeing, and I was trying to figure out why. I think it’s because the other pundits are lamenting the death of some sort…

Google is about to try, yet again, to compete with iMessages, this time by supporting RCS (the successor to SMS/MMS) in their native texting app. As in their previous attempts, their solution isn’t end-to-end encrypted—because honestly, with their business model, how could it be? And as with Google’s previous attempts to unseat a proprietary Apple technology, I’m sure they’ll tout openness: they’ll say that this is a carrier standard while iMessages isn’t, and attempt to use that to put…