Articles

Software engineering lessons from production, raw and honest from the heart — almost 20 years of them. Jump to a year in the sidebar, or browse categories.

July 2020

Path dependence or why existing code always looks bad

Build a new design system in a couple afternoons

June 2020

Wormhole state management

How to grow as a senior engineer or why I got a new job

Hackers

Using scopes for elegant JAMStack permissions

How to lie with facts

May 2020

Screw web performance, just wait a little 😈

Add granular role-based access to your JAMStack app

Looking for the perfect light work device

Don't be weird

What you do while waiting

The 3 types of scalability

April 2020

Why you should build a form generator

Lemme guess, every project involves 1 or 2 forms and they're all the friggen same. You got forms coming out the wazoo. Render fields. Connect to state. Add field validation. Detect submit. Add form validation. Send fetch request. Repeat.

Don't just wait around

Your dumb ideas often work best

Announcing: Find Your Idea

You don't *have* ideas, you develop them

"I just need an idea"

How tests uncover hidden complexity in simple code

The surprising performance boost from changing gif embeds

March 2020

My favorite lessons from Pragmatic Programmer

Configuring your JAMStack app for prod vs. dev

Stuck at home? Advance your career

How you can start using GraphQL today without changing the backend

GraphQL for new projects looks great ... buuuut how do you use it with that old backend cobbled together in Rails over the last bazillion years?

HOW great engineers hack The Process

Why great engineers hack The Process

February 2020

Mocking and testing fetch requests with Jest

Connecting Gumroad to Auth0 for paywalled JAMStack apps

Why you should talk about engineering salaries