Jeremiah Billmann - Developer, Speaker, Blogger
At some point, rather recently, I began to rethink part of my approach to software developent. Joel Spolsky's Architecture Astronauts post , of decades ago, has been weighing on me. I began to grow tired of unnecessary complexity, over-abstractions, library bloat, feature bloat, and the subsequent documentation bloat. Not to mention, dependency bloat. I know, I should probably write a blog…
(Would you rather read code? No problem! View the full working example on either GitHub or CodeSandbox ). In late October, React Hooks was announced. In short, Hooks provide the ability to tap into React features and reuse state logic across components without having to write class components. This is fantastic and it's a big deal. React Hooks will forever change the way that you write your…
Recently I launched Feature Ops, a feature flags (toggles) management service and API , and while you, as a reader, might not necessarily be interested in the service itself, I think you'll find the 21 day journey from nothing to something a tad bit interesting. Of course, it all starts with an idea. I have had many ideas over the years, but before committing to an idea this time around I…
Feature Flags Feature Flags (or Toggles) are essentially glorified if/else statements in code that can be used to determine if a feature, at runtime, should be shown or hidden for end users. Feature toggles are a powerful technique, allowing teams to modify system behavior without changing code. ... but, if used properly, they are oh-so much more . Over the past few years, I've been a part of…
It's no secret that JavaScript has been growing at a rapid pace over the years. JavaScript Bloat The average JS transfer size per website, in the top 1000, has grown almost 500% since late 2010 . Meanwhile, the average HTML transfer size in that same period and selection, when compared to JS, has grown a "paltry" 100% . As a whole, the Average Webpage Is Now the Size of the Original Doom !…
My wife and I recently had our first child. Apparently... that changes things. Lots of things. Many things. Tons of things. Wait a second, why didn't anybody warn me about this?! Anyways, these changes also had an impact on our phones. Problem You see, smartphones have replaced parent's need to own a separate, single camera. So if you throw a baby, (figuratively, not literally, people!)…
When Ghost was first released to the public, I wrote a post on how to install Ghost on Azure Web Sites . Back then, I said: If you're looking for basic, simple, shared hosting for Ghost, then Azure Web Sites might be what you're looking for. They even have a free! as in beer option... and who doesn't love free beer? Well, I'm happy to say that it gets even better than that!…
This blog post originally appeared at Skyline Technologies (my employer) http://skylinetechnologies.com/Blog/Article/2388/ECMAScript-6.aspx Love it or hate it, but if you're doing web development, JavaScript is the one common language denominator. Argue all you want about which web application framework (ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.) is better, but at the end of the day, you will be…
Earlier this year , Twitter released Flight, an event-driven web application framework . Back then, I remarked : My thoughts on Twitter Flight: Simple, clean way of decoupling your JavaScript into pub/sub components, but I wonder about maintainability.. Only to never return to it. I'm a sucker for all things simple , decoupling , and JavaScript , so it's rather surprising I didn't…
So, what's new with the latest release, 0.6, of GarageServer.IO - the simple, lightweight, HTML multiplayer game server for Node.js? Region support! Low latency fixes! Early releases of GarageServer.IO would broadcast state to all players. This was no good because it made developers grumpy. (" ... developers grumpy", as in plural? Who am I trying to kid!) The major issue here was bandwidth.…
[House Buyer] : I'd like for you to build me a house. [House Builder] : Sounds great, I'd love to! [House Buyer] : It needs to have 2 stories, a 2.5 car garage, and it must be done in a month. [House Builder] : Sorry, that can't be done in a month. And , I'd definitely need some more information before I can even begin. [House Buyer] : It's got to be done in month! Work…
If you're looking for basic, simple, shared hosting for Ghost , then Azure Web Sites might be what you're looking for. They even have a free! as in beer option... and who doesn't love free beer? I love beer. I digress, let's get to it. First and foremost, big thanks to William Dibbern of the Ghost development team. He and I worked together to solve the issues we saw with…
Free. Open. Simple . Nailed it. Ghost , the open source Node.js blogging platform, launched last Friday . And you're a looking at it. Within days I had dumped my old blog and switched over to Ghost. These are my thoughts. Simple, Clean, Responsive I'm a firm believer in "less is more". That's what I love most about Ghost. Out of the box, you get the basics of blogging. Basic user…
Last we chatted, I was talking up the JavaScript Cloud and I hinted that it was the perfect backdrop for my next JavaScript endeavor. Well, it certainly was. I kept my word and fully embraced the JavaScript Cloud with the Cloud9 IDE ... and I enjoyed every minute of it. Despite owning a license for WebStorm , a product for which I have very favorable things to say, I found that I preferred the…
I admit it, I'm late to the cloud party . It was only this past week that I decided to fully embrace the cloud for all of my personal storage needs. While I might be lagging in certain aspects of the cloud, I was quicker to adapt in other areas of the cloud. I've used GitHub and CodePlex for my open source projects and the source code for this blog is hosted in the TFS cloud .…
When we last talked, I was declaring my new found fondness of JavaScript . I left off with saying that one could make an argument that JavaScript is one of the most important languages to know at this moment in time. So it came as no surprise to me when Microsoft released TypeScript . What is TypeScript you ask? TypeScript is just JavaScript, with type checking and class-based constructs.…
Recently, I spent quite a bit of time working with vanilla JavaScript during development of an HTML5 game. Prior to, much of my client-side scripting experience was done on line of business applications with small to large doses of jQuery, jQuery plug-ins, jQuery AJAX, jQuery this, jQuery that, etc., etc., etc. So naturally, it was during development of this game that I decided it was time to…
Hello World.