Videos Living Animation What ambitious web application developers need to learn from game developers. Presented at EmberConf 2018 in Portland.
Videos Design for Learning This is a wide-ranging talk on learning and why you need to understand how people learn if you want to build good software. Plus I build a fun orbital mechanics demo. Presented at
Videos How to Add TailwindCSS to an Ember App There is definitely an intimidation factor some people feel about integrating things into Ember apps. While there are plenty of things I want to make easier too, I think a large amount of
Mind and Hand "Mens et Manus" (latin for "Mind and Hand") is the official motto of MIT. Lots of schools have Latin mottoes, and they are usually pretty bland. But mens et
Effective team culture: Five Whys & Stop-the-line When Google set out to measure what makes their best software development teams successful, they found a strong correlation with psychological safety: A shared belief held by members of a team that the
Programming doesn't fit in your brain “A lot of beginners under-appreciate the degree to which googling things is part of a programmer’s job,” says @steveklabnik #wednesdaywisdom pic.twitter.com/FnXo3rBfPb— Glitch (@glitch) May 31, 2017 That quote
Search-first Web Applications Lots of software projects struggle when they try to implement search-related features. I was reminded of this by @trek's reaction to this Algolia marketing tweet: Development teams often delay building search due to
CSS and Markup in Javascript is an Evolutionary Dead End There is a popular trend among some Javascript developers to argue that humans should stop writing CSS and HTML (and HTML-based templates). They argue everything should instead be written as Javascript, to reduce
Cardstack Architecture Notes Many people have expressed an interest in contributing to Cardstack and have been clamoring for some docs to help them get started. This is the first of three posts I intend to ship
Lake Wobegon Web Development There is a strain of thought in the web development community that believes there's a tension between having comprehensive developer tools and delivering good user experiences: This is exactly backwards. At the scale
Strong Conventions Make Hiring Easier The most reliable way to evaluate programmer candidates is to hire them to do a bit of realistic work. This is widely understood, but not widely practiced. The biggest barrier is finding projects
Frameworks are where we iterate on tomorrow's universal abstractions The amount of complexity a single human programmer can handle is fundamentally limited. Until our brave cyborg future comes, even the best programmers can only hold so much in their minds at once.
On Interface Complexity vs Implementation Complexity There are two very different kinds of simplicity in software engineering: simple interfaces and simple implementations. Simple interfaces are absolutely critical, because the budget for interface complexity is paid out of your head.
On the irony of programmers who don't like abstraction An inflammatory anti-Rails post has been getting lots of discussion lately. The author's frustrations are legitimate, but his articulation of the problem takes an absurd turn: The really challenging part in this discussion
Decoupled Drupal: from an Ember maintainer's perspective Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert recently launched a community discussion by asking "should we decouple Drupal with a client-side framework?". My high-level takeaway from the discussion is that the Drupal community
The Framework Learning Cycle Much of the discussion around frameworks -- particularly in the Javascript community -- is mired in misunderstanding over a key question: who are frameworks really for? Beginner Beginning web developers tend to lean