Although custom themes and variations are often responsible for broken UI states like the one below, developers love themes. Why? Developers aren’t known for their vanity about how things look. Hues stand out better against a dark background than a light one. In light mode, blue and black look almost…

Code ownership has clear downsides. Even if a project is successful, having an owner gives you a single point of failure. Bad engineers also argue for ownership. Some engineers are so defensive about their code that they’re unwilling to make changes, and they don’t allow others to contribute changes either…

Managing tabs is tricky once you have hundreds of tabs. You’ll have people on one side telling you to just close your tabs, and people on the other side telling you that some solution like OneTab and Workona works well enough for them. …

I went back to update my personal site, and it was quite an adventure digging into some of the bugs. After a few years, a lot of the dependencies were out-of-date. For example, I had an SSR mismatch issue after updating packages, React, etc, and switching to a new renderer…

In trying to debug server-side rendering issues (SSR), I ran into another problem: This is what I expected to see:

Fix the problem of scopes. There’s often this tradeoff of polluting one namespace or another. Over the last few years I’ve seen the value of inlining code. Scoping code to where it is used is a great way to avoid polluting a file’s namespace. …

In my journey to understand encryption, I learned to appreciate just how difficult it can be to mathematically convert a pattern of data into something that looks like random noise. The fact that we can do this at all is amazing. Further, encryption algorithms need to make it easy to…

I haven’t created a class in years. There’s only one exception: React. Classes are the idiomatic way to create a stateful components (until hooks are released). I liked to think I’d use a class if the situation called for it. I used to write a lot of classes when I…

During my time as a programmer I’ve seen a shift in how programmers are categorized. I think we’ll see more in the future. All large software companies need to come up with ways of dividing work among programers. …