On how to take your job back from the designer — You see an ✖ icon in the top-right corner of a box, and you immediately think it closes the box. If the icon were in the center of the box, you probably would not know what it’s supposed to do. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I’m not…

The so-called A players, are they real? — I still remember an interview almost ten years ago, where the interviewer asked about my previous job. I listed a few projects I’ve completed during the six months I spent at that company, and the interviewer was quite impressed by the number of projects. …

What blocking ads has taught me — I’ve recently poked at the source code of some page to figure out how to block annoying ads. Normally, I just right-click on an element I don’t want to see and the browser just creates a custom rule for me, but this time I noticed something weird. The selector looked…

Busting the age-old myth — From time to time, I bump into an article that perpetuates one of the oldest myths in our industry: “To stay effective/relevant/productive as a front-end developer, you need to learn a new framework every week/month/quarter.” I won’t even go into whether you need frameworks, to begin with. I don’t know…

Why telling the difference makes you a better programmer — In English language, the distinction between “simple” and “easy” can sometimes be vague. In some cases, they are used interchangeably. For example “It’s simple to make an omelette” for most people means about the same as “it’s easy to make an omelette.” But is there a difference? And does the…

How to cache data obtained asynchronously when using global variables — In my article on the Vanilla app project setup, I mentioned using global state. In this article, I will discuss the case of using global state as a cache with asynchronous functions, and reveal a simple trick that will help you deal with race conditions that arise from this. Let…

Working with the DOM in Vanilla JS apps (part 2): Creating and updating lists — I promised in my previous post that I would cover lists in this one. We will go over a few different ways of working with the lists, and these approaches should cover most of the common cases. These approaches aren’t the only ones, though. Our goal here is not to…

Working with the DOM in Vanilla JS apps (part 1): Tips for creating and manipulating DOM nodes without frameworks. — In the previous post, I’ve outlined a basic setup for Vanilla JS projects. There, I mentioned several things related to DOM node creation and manipulation and promised to cover that in more detail in the next article. Mastering the DOM manipulation is the key to a successful Vanilla JS project…

On how developers shoot themselves in the foot all the time — This article was prompted by something I read on the Medium. I’m not going to link to the article or call out the author. I’m just going to give you a short version and discuss why it breaks the two commandments I list at the end. The article goes something…