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New Year, New Goals: Why Set Goals?
The New Year is peak time for setting goals, but many people set goals for the wrong reasons. Why should you set goals?
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Creating Your Own Image Format In The Browser
A technical deep-dive in how to polyfill a custom image format in the browser using Service Workers, Streams, and Web Crypto.
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"const" As A Force For Factoring JavaScript
In the "let" vs "const" debate for JavaScript, I prefer "const" because it helps promote decomposition in my functions.
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How To Turn Your Static Site Into An API With Puppeteer
A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at Nordic.js about Powerful Automation with the Chrome DevTools Protocol. In the talk, I shared a demo of an API using Puppeteer that retrieved content from a static website. Let's build that together!
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2017 Music Journey
Every year I like to reflect on the music that was the most impactful to me. I used to do this by picking an album of the year. Now, I put together music journeys.
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QUnit-In-Browser: Lightweight End-To-End Testing
Last week, I published the 1.0.0 release of QUnit-In-Browser and, shortly after, got the chance to discuss it briefly at dotJS. I’ve been using the package for a while now at Netflix and wanted to give a bit of background into what it is and why I’ve been working on it.
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Intro to Web Components
There are lots of great and really in-depth resources on Web Components, but relatively few that cover how to dive in and connect all the disparate pieces of them. This short article will take you through developing a simple web component that uses HTML Templates, Custom Elements, and Shadow DOM as currently specified so you can begin exploring these awesome new web technologies!
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Dear Self, It's Okay
The following is a letter to myself about burnout and, more importantly, encouragement when burnout begins to set in.
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Occasionally Work A Day
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” The quote above (often attributed to Confucius) is one that I see frequently floating around social media feeds. It resonates deeply with our desire to avoid displeasure (“work”) and find fulfillment. So, similarly to many others, it was a quote which I really appreciated as I entered the workforce a few years ago.
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Introversion & Empathy
I am an introvert. By that, I mean that I am drained by interacting with others, especially so in situations that are uncomfortable or unknown to me. When I feel tired or stressed I tend to isolate myself and stay relatively quiet.
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Discussing "Seniority" in Software Engineering
Lately, I’ve noticed posts making the rounds again on what it means to be a “senior” software engineer. Most of these posts center on two things: 1. How fuzzy the definition of a “senior” software engineer is, and 2. How unlikely it is that developers in their early 20s meet that definition. Now, I’m not going to bother adding yet another definition to the mix, but instead I want to focus on the 2nd point mentioned above.
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What Do You Do?
In spite of the prevalence of software engineering nowadays, I still have many friends and family members that don’t know what it is that I do. So, the following is a made-up conversation to hopefully help clarify what it is that I (and many other web developers/software engineers) do.
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Being A Music Junkie In Silicon Valley
If I had to rank my hobbies in order of time spent on them, “listening to music” would most likely be at the top, only potentially superseded by my time spent coding (especially if you count my work hours). It has been a passion of mine since middle school, but in the fast-paced, results-driven world of Silicon Valley, it is a hobby that often feels out of place.
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I Don't Care If You Like Ember
In my current role at LinkedIn, I interact with a lot of developers; on an average day, I work with a dozen or more different individuals discussing software engineering in some capacity. So, you can imagine that I encounter a lot of differing opinions about how we should be building our web applications.
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Progressive Web Apps: Don't Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater
This past week was Google IO 2016 and while there were lots of noteworthy developments and announcements, the Mobile Web track was particularly focused on one topic: Progressive Web Apps.
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On Impostor Syndrome
With “annual review season” now almost over, I’ve been thinking a lot about impostor syndrome and the converse Dunning-Kruger effect. Having to evaluate yourself (more so than having others evaluate you) opens up an internal dialog about how competent you really believe yourself to be, which can easily lead to feeling like an impostor.
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Don't Ask Me Questions; Give Me Hypotheses
I’m an introvert by nature, which means I try to limit my interactions to those that I feel are meaningful and efficient with their use of energy. Similarly, this means that interactions which I feel are inconsequential or inefficient with their use of energy tend to annoy me. In particular, I have recently spent a good deal of time thinking about my interactions related to solving problems and how to improve them. I feel that, within the realm of software engineering, those problem solving interactions too often wind up being more inefficient and wasteful than they should be.
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Bottom-Up Culture & Code Reviews
We’ve all heard that workplace culture is important and, with the experience of my relatively short career, I can attest to that fact. I’ve had numerous lunch-table discussions about company culture ranging from the now-cliché bashing of Silicon Valley lavishness to singing praises of how awesome LinkedIn’s culture is.