programming, usability & interaction design
Don t question why. Fast is better than slow. That s just how it is. Your job is to take everything you can already do and do it faster. If you can embrace the idea that fast is intrinsically better than slow, you re halfway home. If you can get an entire team of players to embrace that idea, you re going to win a lot of games. All other things being equal, if I can get the ball from Point A to…
[this is a devlog post — a quick, lightly-edited post about stuff I m working on right now] I ll be introducing some breaking changes in the next major version of Ohm and I d like to make the upgrade path as smooth as possible. So I ve been investigating patterns for specific migration and compat packages in the JS ecosystem. I found a few interesting examples. Most of them aim to support…
A few times in my career I’ve gotten feedback that really knocked me on my ass. The first few times it happened, I wasn’t mature enough to learn much from it. But eventually I discovered a little trick — something that helps me set my ego aside and actually listen. The details aren’t all that important, but to set the scene: a Principal Engineer I worked with had called me out for being overly…
Since early last year, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependency on the big US tech companies, and US companies in general. Following Tim Bray , I’ve been thinking of this as de-Googling . I don’t really want to get into the reasons, except to say that I’m under no illusion that my support (or lack of it) makes any difference to those companies. For me, it’s much more about reducing risk 1 , and…
A long time ago, I spent a few years working on garbage collection in the J9 Java VM. 1 And even though I ve since done mostly done higher-level stuff, having a deeper knowledge of GC has continued to come in useful. Yesterday, it was an insight from one of my favourite GC papers, A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection , which helped me solve a tricky problem. ohm s incremental parsing I m working…
I wrote a book! It s called WebAssembly from the Ground Up — it s an online book where you learn Wasm by writing a simpler compiler in JavaScript. You can read a free sample if it tickles your fancy. Together with my friend Mariano , I ve been working on the book for just over two and half years. And (big surprise) it was a huge learning experience! While everything is still fresh in my mind, I…
In 2012 I was working at Google on the Chrome team in Munich. I was writing a lot of JavaScript code and constantly having to wait for code reviews from a team in Los Angeles. On one of my trips to Mountain View, I thought: screw it, I’m going to LA to meet those bastards . I didn’t ask my manager, didn’t tell the LA team I was coming — just booked a flight, went into the office, and introduced…
Early in my career, I was convinced there was good code and bad code . That you could look at something and — without knowing anything about the context — pass judgement on it. These days, my views are much more nuanced. I try to adapt my style to the situation. The code I write, and the process I use, depends a lot more on what the goals are. Am I trying to bang together a quick prototype to…
In some of the communities I hang around in 1 , there’s a fondness for the kind of industrial research that happened at places like PARC and Bell Labs. Things like Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar, and Plan 9 not only introduced new ideas but demonstrated them in practical, working systems. If you want to actually do research like this, how should you go about it? There are a couple of obvious strategies.…
During my CS undergrad at Carleton University , I had the opportunity to do a bunch of internships. 1 Looking back, I can’t help but think how lucky I was! I got to work on some great teams, learned a ton, and had a lot of fun. Corel My first real internship was on the Linux team at Corel in the summer of 2000. I was super excited about this, for a couple of reasons: I had grown up using…