Do you know that meme of Homer Simpson trying to hide in the bushes? That's how I used to feel when my coworkers would discuss asymmetric encryption, certificate signing, salting, and scary-sounding acronyms like PBKDF2. After years of trying to ignore this problem, I decided to study up on modern
Like a lot of people, in the past couple of months I've been working from home. One of the things I missed about working from an office is having a dedicated monitor that cycles through graphs showing the latest metrics about the services that our team owns. One day as
code analysis
A few months ago I worked on a legacy Typescript project where having Class files with more than 1,500 lines-of-code was quite common. A single source-file with this many lines-of-code is sometimes known as a "God Class" because it is capable of doing too many different things. Every time
automation
Update: Check out headless-devtools, a library for automating DevTools actions from code by leveraging the DevTools Protocol Chrome DevTools is the go-to analysis tool for understanding what's going on under-the-covers of your app and conducting perf-audits. As you are interacting with the site like a real user would, you can
code analysis
This post aims to give a walkthrough of how to design a custom ESLint rule without any prerequisites. However, some experience with Javascript Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) will be helpful. Consider watching my talk about getting started with ASTs. ESLint is a fantastic linting tool to help enforce your team's
performance
This was originally posted at the 2015 Performance Calendar. A lot of different factors can affect a web page's performance. For this reason, truly effective Web Performance Optimization starts with identifying the most significant perf bottlenecks of your site. This is usually done with tools like DevTools, WebPagetest, PageSpeed Insights,
javascript
A while ago I found that interaction with a component in our site results in many detached dom elements. At first glance, it wasn't clear from the code what was causing it. After some research I realized that the detached dom elements are still referenced by prevObject- an internal property
performance
Update: I presented a talk about this tool at the 2016 Reversim Summit. Slides can be found here. "Chunk Scatter" (github, demo) is a simple tool I wrote for analyzing HTTP responses that use chunked encoding. It plots each chunk on a scatter graph to help visualize when each chunk
javascript
One of the first things you learn about Javascript when you start delving into the language is that it doesn't support classical inheritance, but rather prototypal inheritance. The topic of prototype-based inheritance is the subject of many online articles and interview questions. Usually examples used to explain it involve Employees
Last month our company had its yearly Hackathon. The hardest part of any Hackathon is, of course, to choose what project to take on. I knew I wanted to break out of my comfy web development bubble and mess around with hardware. A coworker suggested I set out to find