Designing a podcast client for KaiOS smart feature phones — More than 3.1 billion people (~40%) are not connected to the internet, the majority of whom live in Africa and Asia. For companies, this presents an opportunity to build hardware and software that connects the “next billion,” particularly in the mobile space with platforms like Android Go and KaiOS. …

JavaScript has two zeroes: -0 and +0. They are somehow both the same and different. — A Tale of Two Zeroes Since the early versions of JavaScript there have always been two ways of performing equality comparison: Abstract Equality Comparison using == aka “double equals” Strict Equality Comparison using === aka “triple equals” ES6 delivered a third option in the form of the Object.is method. It has some slight differences that…

AWS Transit Gateway is an under-appreciated service providing secure, scalable, and maintainable connectivity between distributed services and on-premise networks. — Supporting Scale As software company offerings expand, so do their teams. When startups get acquired or go public, the engineering team grows into a full engineering organization. That engineering organization then needs to scale to support more customers and in the process, monolithic architectures make way to service-oriented designs.

There are a lot of ideas about software and how to drive its development. Some approaches are promising, while others can be pretty problematic. Here are just a few strategies you might have seen used by other engineers for crafting digital products. Beta Driven Development 🐤 MVP is Life. Beta Driven Development (AKA the…

Knowing how to troubleshoot tests is an essential software skill — NASA’s earliest attempts at launching rockets were part of the Bumper program, comprised of unmanned rockets in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. The next decade saw many rocket launches — some successful, while others burst into flames. Then, in 1961, the Soviet Union successfully sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagari on…

With Proxy, you get a tiger object disguised as a cat object. Here are about half a dozen examples that I hope will convince you that Proxy provides powerful metaprogramming in Javascript. — Note: examples may be dated, and similar functionality can be achieved natively in newer versions of ECMAScript or syntactical supersets like TypeScript. This article shows what’s possible natively in ES2015 using Proxy.

A Symbol Originally meant to introduce private properties to ES6, Symbols offer an approach to metaprogramming in Javascript that provides extension hooks into language operators and methods without risking user name collisions. A symbol is a primitive data type that is immutable and globally-unique. There are three kinds of Symbols: User-defined symbols…

Thank u, [Symbol.iterator].next Thank u, [Symbol.iterator].next I’m so f****in’ grateful for this spec Symbol.iterator Symbol.iterator is the protocol that makes native objects like Array, Set, and Map iterable by providing a hook into language features like for…of loops and the spread operator. The most obvious use case is in creating new…

So the last shall be [0], and the first [length — 1]. – Adapted from Matthew 20:16 I’ll skip the Malthusian Catastrophe and get to it: arrays are one of the simplest and most important data structures. While terminal elements (first and last) are frequently accessed, Javascript provides no convenient…