This Week I Learned #1 —JOURNAL

The Infra Engineer’s Blind Spot—JOURNAL

Why I ended up down a rabbit hole instead of shipping.

find, grep, xargs, and newlines and null—JOURNAL

Turns out tr is your friend for this kind of thing.

Follow-Up on Command-Line Finding and Filtering—JOURNAL

A simpler solution that doesn’t require tr… if you have GNU utils or other alternatives.

This Week I Learned #3—JOURNAL

Less reading this week… because more composing.

mut (and set) and autotracking in Ember Octane —JOURNAL

Understanding a surprising behavior—and fixing a refactoring hazard.

Designing an Atomic CSS System—JOURNAL

Making my CSS scalable from the outset.

This Week I Learned #5—JOURNAL

Making Illegal States Unrepresentable—In TypeScript—JOURNAL

Showing how Scott Wlaschin’s approach in F^♯ translates to a language with a very different type system.

Building the Slow Way—JOURNAL

Or, part of why rewrite is taking a while: I’m in this for the long haul.

A Git Workflow for Managing Long-Running Upgrades—JOURNAL

Using some lessons learned in the trenches of large upgrades.

Migrating Off of PromiseProxyMixin in Ember Octane —JOURNAL

An important refactor for getting rid of mixins and proxies.

Async Data and Autotracking in Ember Octane—JOURNAL

Digging into the load helper and AsyncData type I introduced in an earlier post.

Tracking in the Glimmer VM↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Chris Garrett (@pzuraq) explains to me how autotracking and the Glimmer (Ember) template layer connect!

Data Constructors, Part 1: Understanding by Implementing —JOURNAL

Understanding an idea from Standard ML-like languages by implementing it in (boring) TypeScript.

Autotracking: Elegant DX Via Cutting-Edge CS —JOURNAL

A modern JavaScript reactivity system powered by Lamport clocks and incremental computation and depth-first searches: oh my!

Things I Was Wrong About: Types —JOURNAL

Because it would do us all good to be a little more honest about where we’ve changed our minds or simply been mistaken.

Initializing Class Fields in Ember Octane —JOURNAL

One of the many small-but-lovely benefits of getting to use native classes in Ember Octane.

Writing Robust TypeScript Libraries—JOURNAL

A subtler art than it might at first appear, if you intend to support JS or even loose mode TS.

Notes on Thoughtbot’s “Stop Using 'any'”—JOURNAL

A couple tweaks and improvements to a good post!

Understanding args in Glimmer Components—JOURNAL

Clearing up a common confusion with a worked example.

Announcement: Speaking at EmberConf 2021 —ELSEWHERE

In which I’ll be speaking for 30 minutes at a JS conference… and will spend only about 5 of those minutes on JS.

A Useful Approach to Problem-Solving—JOURNAL

(It’s useful to me, at least.)

A Gap in (My Knowledge of) the Developer Productivity Literature —JOURNAL

Where is the equivalent of Accelerate for anything outside of DevOps?

Naming and Framing—JOURNAL

Or, why did Accelerate matter for DevOps?

Introducing “Heuristics for Good Software Design”—JOURNAL

A series of posts in which I explain how I think about effective software design.

Progressive Disclosure of Complexity and Typed FP Languages—JOURNAL

Or, one part of why to some extent Elm, and to a significant degree PureScript Halogen, can be quite difficult for users to get their heads around at first.

RFC: Semantic Versioning for TypeScript Types ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

In which years of thinking and months of design come to fruition.

Impromptu EmberConf 2021 AMA↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

In which my friend David Baker put me on the spot… and it was great!

Keep It Local—ELSEWHERE

Or: (part of) what “reasoning about your code” really means; being my EmberConf 2021 talk.

Chatting About Web Dev ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Ember CLI history, ember-auto-import, web bundling, and more

MusicXML and Percussion Notation—JOURNAL

Digging into How Dorico and StaffPad represent percussion differently.

Small, Non-Trivial Projects for Learning—JOURNAL

For learning effectively, nothing is better than a real project which gives you a place to experiment and play.

Program modifications at low cost?—LIBRARY

Announcement: Speaking at TypeVille 2022 —ELSEWHERE

On the subject of “Types as Tools for Thought”

Semantic Versioning for TypeScript Types 1.0.0-beta.1↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

After years of work, I’ve published the first beta of the spec for semantic versioning for TypeScript types!

SemVer for TS in Practice—JOURNAL

Showing how the recommendations from www.semver-ts.org can actually work in the real world.

Misusing TypeScript Assertion Functions for Fun and Profit—JOURNAL

A horrible (but very useful) hack I came up with yesterday for adding types to some old code.

A Pleasing Symmetry in Rust—JOURNAL

Appreciating how Rust enum variants are mirrors of its kinds of structs.

On the Ember Blog: Plain Functions as Helpers ↩︎—❈—ELSEWHERE

Making sure people understand a new feature we shipped which is a big deal.

Flow State—JOURNAL

Maybe it’s less important than we like to think?

Marco’s Rule of Software Stacks (Expanded)—JOURNAL

On being the biggest user of a given technology.

Trade-offs—JOURNAL

They are real; but too often offered as an excuse to avoid thinking rather than a reason to think harder.

necessarily simple abstractions—LIBRARY

Organizing Many Software Projects—JOURNAL

How I lay out my file system and how I tweak Git for working on literally dozens of different repositories.

Reasoning About Reference Cycles—JOURNAL

Rust’s lifetime types are challenging, but they bring a capability I miss all the time in other languages.

A UML Comeback?—JOURNAL

Because the tools are positioned for sketching, now?

Product Idea: Meal Tracking for Athletes —JOURNAL

All of the existing tools need broader design vocabularies.

Special Null Syntax vs. Types and Functions—JOURNAL

Why does Maybe.map feel better than ?? and friends to me? A sketch.

Build Yourself Small Tools—JOURNAL

Feature Idea: Week-Level Smart Training Plans —JOURNAL

Training (at my level, anyway) is less about individual day-to-day work and more about what I do each week. The tools should support that!

Competencies—JOURNAL

An observation on the dynamics of (sufficiently) large organizations.

dimension change/code review—JOURNAL

Is GitHub Copilot Any Good?—JOURNAL

Betteridge’s Law applies, but the details of why I think so might still interest you.

Be a quality detector.—LIBRARY

Writing Tools—JOURNAL

Obsidian, Bear, high-quality native apps vs. cross-platform Electron apps…

On Ember’s New Major Version Cadence—JOURNAL

Not just how this one specific process for one JavaScript framework is changing, but why—and why I hope it will be useful to other projects as well!

Trying BBEdit and Nova—JOURNAL

I am taking some time off, and this seems like a great time to mess with alternatives for my software stack.

Je ne sais quoi—JOURNAL

Programming languages, cameras, computers, and other technologies—and feel.

Is TypeScript Good?—A Reply to Rach Smith—JOURNAL

Taking a thoughtful post as an excuse to discuss software system dynamics through the lens of TypeScript.

My Current Mac Stack—JOURNAL

The software I use every day, with commentary.

Extended Time Off Report—JOURNAL

What I got up to over the past month! Because I relax by learning and doing.

Reflections on a Month with BBEdit and Nova—JOURNAL

What works, what doesn’t, and where did this experiment lead me in the end?

Unsafe—JOURNAL

On a common meme: “Rust would not help because we would have to use a lot of unsafe”.

Stay Curious About Your Tools—JOURNAL

I have lately enjoyed digging further into Unix and macOS fundamentals—and it has reminded me to stay curious about my tools!

Just Keep Climbing—JOURNAL

Or: how to make progress.

Hierarchical systems—LIBRARY

Unmeasurable Costs and Benefits—JOURNAL

One major reason standard advice about “demonstrating value (or impact)” does not work well for foundational software, including (but not only) open-source library code.