This is my personal website. I irregularly publish things I write, build, and think about on this site. Welcome.
In 2004, as part of my public school’s 6th-grade curriculum, I took a penmanship class. I don’t think kids take penmanship class these days. In penmanship class, we wrote cursive . Cursive dictates that, aside from a few occasions, the pen maintains contact with the paper. All letters in the cursive alphabet flow into each other using romantic ligatures. In penmanship class, we learned a standard…
I like working on software projects that are organized intuitively. Thoughtfully arranged modules and meaningful names make writing quality code feel natural. In my experience, Apache HTTP servers are organized intuitively ↗ . File-systems and websites both follow a tree structure, so mapping the project design to the webserver’s routing rules seems like a no-brainer. Next.js’ router ↗ reflects…
Note: This is a rather general post, written for people curious about how to think about “the frontend”. However, I think it’s relevant to interested humans of all knowledge and skill levels. Last week I wrote a post called “ Practical frontend architecture ”. It got some unexpected love on Hacker News and made the front page. Now that plenty of people have read that post, I wish I could rewrite…
Update: I felt this post needed a few points of clarification, so I added these at the bottom. If you’d like to skip there now, click here . We’ve been upgrading our frontend tech stack at Liferay Cloud this past year. Nifty tools we’ve adopted include: React: easy componentization, commonly used, flexible Typescript: catch runtime errors at build, easy debugging Next.js: SSR by default, capable…
We bought an old truck. It’s not a 70’s Bronco. It’s not an 80’s Ranger or Gladiator. It’s really not fancy or anything. Though, I guess “fancy” doesn’t really go with “truck”. Over the past few years, Toyota Land Cruisers have exploded in popularity on the secondary market. Those sleek, beautiful, legendary off-roaders are appreciating in value, high-mileage be damned. Land Cruisers, especially…
When I wake up in the morning, I kind of just slip into my day. I don’t have much of a routine, aside from making coffee for my wife and me. I used to have a morning routine. That was back in community college when I didn’t have enough of a social life to keep me distracted from my existential angst. Back then I woke up at 4:30 AM and ran 3 miles before cooking myself a chicken and spinach…
I don’t write often. When I do set out to write, I write stream-of-consciousness, existential things. These things are not (normally) worthy of posting. “What’s worthy of posting?”, you might ask. I hardly know the answer, but let’s start at the most basic and see what we can see. Level 1: update posting One key to writing more often is finding an excuse to write. The stream of my consciousness…
My wife and I live in a small place. It’s an old house that was originally part of another old property but split into a separate lot, and then this house was split in half into a duplex. Our half is a bit over 500 square feet and it’s perfect for us. It includes a frontroom, kitchen, and then a bedroom in the back, with a connected bathroom and a narrow closet. There’s also a hatch leading up…
You may not have heard of Zettelkasten ↗ before. Here’s a quick and dirty overview: Zettelkasten generally refers to a notetaking technique meant to free the brain from idea storage so that one can focus on idea gathering Individual notes should be “atomic”, meaning that the topical scope of an individual note should cover one basic piece of information Notes should be flatly organized (not nested…