Blog

Frontend development is currently contending with two crises simultaneously: the bewilderingly rapid increase in the complexity of our toolkit, and facing up to the fact that much of the software we write is brittle, bloated, and broken. While these are often conflated, we need to recognize that sometimes there is a balance between the two of them.

In which I rant about how government, the press, and social media have shaped our view of a global threat, and created an insane response.

Distributed computing, formerly the province of academics, comes into the browser uninvited.

Is there something virtuous in the skepticism that allows one to persist in the belief that the world is flat? The answer is no.

When I began working a freelancer last year, I knew I wanted to use an agile approach to build apps for my clients, even if they were small projects. As there are limited resources for agiling independently, I thought I would write about my experience for others to use.

One of the best things about React is that it manages to combine almost-real JavaScript with an intuitive way to interact with the DOM.

React requires a barrier to entry to get started with, that dropping a script tag on a page does not. Or so the common wisdom goes.

Say you have a blog that talks about science or data on a regular basis. What do you do?

One of the side effects of working with redux is that it forces you to think about your application in terms of state instead of thinking in terms of user workflow. While state might seem like an implementation detail, with experience it becomes more a part of the design process, allowing us to accurately predict "sad path" situations that may arise when the app is in a particular state.

I've been working on a large-scale React-Redux project for several months now. React is not a framework and so it doesn't enforce a particular way of grouping related code or related files, code style or organization. I've been thinking about what it means to provide forward-maintainability in this type of codebase and how we can make our code understandable to other human beings.