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(Many disclaimers belong here, including, but not limited to: this probably applies differently or not at all in organizations without formal ladders and review processes; most and perhaps all of the early-career women I’ve coached on this have been white, and many but not all have been from non-traditional backgrounds; it is OK if you don’t want to climb a ladder; some companies are evil, some…
You landed in Tokyo for work in January 2020 and there was a text from your mom saying your brother was in the hospital with a surprisingly bad case of pneumonia. You’d seen him just a few weeks ago when the whole family all got together for Christmas, which was exhausting. You and your partner agreed on the trip home that you would skip next year. Your last night in Tokyo, outside the Naka-meguro…
My job as an engineering manager requires a lot of reading. Every day, my browser gains a few more tabs as I open internal documents that people share with me in the course of our conversations. In sharing those documents, people are seeking to provide me with more detail, background, and context about a topic we’re discussing. At the end of a day or week, there can be a whole lot of documents…
The holidays are the perfect time for setting up a Raspberry Pi, screwing it up, and having to start over again. I’ve done this enough times in the last two weeks that I decided to write some stuff down. Of note: I’m using a Mac. I've run these steps on a Raspberry Pi 4 and they worked. I used the Pi Imager to put an image on an SD card. (If you don’t intend to use the desktop GUI, use the Lite…
My time at Indeed focused on improving front-end development practices and tooling across product teams. It was a journey from stabilization to remediation to modernization to, finally, innovation. In the process, I got to build and grow a team, and gain new skills in managing managers and setting product strategy and vision. My capstone project, as it were, was a micro-frontend platform. Over the…
Camille Fournier wrote a post a few months back about the challenges of product ownership for internal platforms. Her observations resonated with me a lot after four years working within an internal platforms organization at Indeed — how hard it can be to establish viable success metrics, how easy it can be to overestimate your understanding of your customers, how challenging it can be to serve a…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. I wrote previously about setting up a client-side JS project to use Webpack and Babel . In this post, I'll cover the next step: adding ESLint to the project to keep the JavaScript code clean and following a consistent style. This is the easiest step of all — so easy that at first I…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. I wrote previously about setting up a client-side JS project to use Webpack . You can see the code as it stands as of that last post . In this post, I'll cover the next step: using Webpack and Babel to convert ES6 code into code that can be used in all modern browsers. Why ES6? I'm…
I'm working on a project that may or may not see the light of day: a collection of simple games written in JavaScript. The goal of the project is to help JavaScript learners understand how to break moderately complex problems into their constituent parts; in the process, the project will also show the use of modern JavaScript tooling. A secondary goal for me is to write about the process of…
It was three years ago today that I sat for a day of whiteboard interviews in a tiny room at Bazaarvoice with a series of terrifyingly smart people. When the interviews were over, we had cupcakes — it happened to be my birthday. A few days later, I had an offer; a few weeks later, I flew back to Austin for my first day, staying at a rental house where the chickens who greeted me were like a warm…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. Camille Fournier tweeted earlier today asking about the economics of conferences, and how that impacts whether speakers get paid to speak. This is something I've thought about a lot over the years, so I wanted to write a few things down. I have the tiniest bit of rather outdated…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. When I wrote about HTTP/2 earlier this week , one of my complaints was that there wasn't a great way to visualize what was going on with an HTTP/2 connection — and that Chrome's dev tools often tell a story that seems to conflict with the story told by Chrome's net-internals log. I…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. Earlier this year, I got the chance to speak with Google's Ilya Grigorik about HTTP/2 for the 1.10 episode of the TTL Podcast . It was a great primer for me on how HTTP/2 works and what it means for how we build the web, but it wasn't until more recently that I started to think…
I recently started in a new role: I'm the dev lead of a project that was already in the hands of a group of skilled developers before I showed up, a project whose scope and technologies extend far beyond the experiences I've had up until now. As you might imagine, there have been a lot of challenges, but one that's been particularly interesting has been figuring out how to meaningfully contribute…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. It's been almost three years since I wrote A Baseline for Front-End Developers , probably my most popular post ever. Three years later, I still get Twitter mentions from people who are discovering it for the first time. In some ways, my words have aged well: there is, shockingly,…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. My team at Bazaarvoice has been spending a lot of time lately thinking about quality and how we can have greater confidence that our software is working as it should. We've long had functional tests in place that attempt to ask questions like "When a user clicks a button, will The…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. I spoke at the Times Open Source Science Fair a couple of weeks ago. I'll admit that I was pretty skeptical of the concept when I was first asked, but as someone who used to work as an editor at a tiny newspaper in upstate New York, I wasn't about to say no when the Times asked me…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. I wrote a README the other day for a project that I'm hoping other developers will look at and learn from, and as I was writing it, I realized that it was the sort of thing that might have intimidated the hell out of me a couple of years ago, what with its casual mentions of Node,…
After a week that seemed just chock full of people being stupid about women in technology, I just found myself thinking back on how it was that I ended up doing this whole computer thing in the first place. I recorded a video a while back for the High Visibility Project , but that really just told the story of how I ended up doing web development. The story of how I got into computers begain when…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. I seem to be getting a lot of emails these days asking a deceptively simple question: “How do I get better at JavaScript?” What follows are some semi-random thoughts on the subject: The thing that I’ve come to realize about these questions is that some things just take time. I wish…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. I have updated this post to show the code using the API that was released in jQuery 1.5.0. A few weeks ago, a major rewrite of jQuery's Ajax functionality landed in the jQuery GitHub repo. Thanks to Julian Aubourg , jQuery looks like it will get a feature that I've desperately…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. Two years and three weeks ago, I lost my job. My partner and I had just had an expensive deck built; I’d just bought a gratuitously fancy grill to go on it. My token severance check was in the mail — I’d spend most of it to be able to keep my work computer. And…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. One of my personal goals for this year was to start being part of the solution to the dearth of female speakers at tech events. Though I’ve talked at a couple of smallish local events over the past few months, this past weekend I got to do it in a big way: I presented a talk…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. There’s been a lot of activity around my last post, On jQuery & Large Applications . A number of people have asked me why, exactly, I’m so opposed to using jQuery as part of a roll-your-own solution. To answer that, let’s start by looking at (some of) the pieces…
This post is really old! I've kept it around because it may still be interesting, but many things may be out of date. Update: I’ve written a separate post on the wisdom of rolling your own large application toolkit that incorporates jQuery. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about JavaScript applications. As my skills have evolved, I’ve had the privilege of working on more actual…