Here’s where you messed up. Your tech lead told you to build out a new API endpoint for an upcoming feature. It was supposed to be simple: just return a list of the current user’s email addresses. You start with the usual boilerplate. You register the new endpoint. You associate…

Nightmare at 20,000 feet is one of the most iconic Twilight Zone episodes of all time. It tells the story of Bob Wilson, a salesman with a nervous condition. Bob peers out through the window of an airplane. …

Pomodoro extensions for software engineers — In the late 14th century, the townspeople of Salisbury, England were summoned to their cathedral by a machine. It was a wonderful and strange device. It consisted of a collection of iron gears and wheels and bars, all arranged in a…

Techniques for collaboration — You reboot your development server, but it happens again: err_node_unsafe. This wasn’t here yesterday. What changed? It’s 9:48 in the morning and your coffee is already cold. Most of the other people on your team aren’t in the office yet. This is your fifth week at the company, your feature…

Let’s reflect on all those times that JavaScript made your day really special. 1. When you used “==” and now you don’t know what equality is anymore I tried comparing two Arrays and I think I might have created a time paradox. 2. When your code caused too many repaints in the browser What do you mean the app is slow? It works fine on my 2017 MacBook Pro. 3. When you let your users down because you forgot to check for undefined

Documentation for engineers is a wonderful thing to have. As a new team member, I usually have a ton of questions. Many of those will need to be answered by a teammate — but whenever there’s a good doc for something, I breathe a sigh of relief. But the docs…

Software Engineers focus a lot on optimizing their state of Flow. But I’m most curious about its opposite: The Ebb. The Ebb is when you have a project to work on but you find yourself checking your email again. It’s when you’ll find any excuse to get pulled away from…

One of my favorite hobbies is hacking. I mean that in a “build something for fun” sense, not a “compromising other people’s systems” sense. I’m always on the lookout for platforms that make for fun weekend projects. These are some of my favorites. 1. Make art in Java with easy tweaking Processing has one of the best-designed APIs…

Let’s say you really miss 2010 and you want to listen to some old-timey chillwave music. Try searching for “chillwave” on Spotify and get ready for a life-hack: One of the playlist results is called “The Pulse of Chillwave”. It was created by Particle Detector, a very special Spotify user. …