Recipe This recipe is adapted from a recipe on the blog Merry Merzville, which is in turn adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. My modifications are pretty minor. This recipe would not exist without theirs. Beyond that, let’s not bury the lede. The story behind these muffins…

Last week, I read the bizarre story of Governor Mike Parson of Missouri vowing to prosecute local journalists who notified his office of a data leak in a state website. In a press conference, he claimed that the reporters “decoded” the site’s HTML in a “multi-step process,” struggling to pronounce…

I was laid off last week. Officially, I was impacted by “significant restructuring.” I never expected to become so conversant with corporate lingo. It’s one of the lesser skills I acquired during my 8 years at the company, mostly after Firefox OS was announced as a priority. …

I have come to appreciate ESLint very much in recent years. A robust and reliable JavaScript linter, ESLint can be used not only to detect common programming mistakes, but also to enforce a consistent code style. Its utility cannot be overstated. …

I recently started work on a project I’m calling Ensemble. Ensemble will be a minimalist data-sharing platform. It will allow data scientists to quickly and easily create public dashboards with no web development experience. In the process of writing a project README, I realized I had accidentally written my software…

When writing software, we should approach our own ideas with skepticism. We have more ideas than users have needs. Features do not guarantee success. If they did, we would line up to trade smartphones for punch cards. Myspace would acquire Twitter. Picasa would be the new Instagram. This doesn’t happen…

We use Optimizely on the Mozilla Developer Network to build and analyze split experiments. We find that the tool helps us move forward with confidence, understanding how changes affect user behavior. …

Update: This technique no longer works because the Twitter favicon is no longer hosted from the twitter.com domain and the ?redirect_after_login query parameter only works with resources on the twitter.com domain. In Detect if visitors are logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google+, Tom Anthony explains how to determine what social…

I often recommend that software developers become familiar with the fundamentals of usability — we are all designers, whether we know it or not. But this takes time. When we are not able to design usable interfaces ourselves, then, it can be wise to rely on frameworks, conventions, and other…