I'm a technologist, a designer, and a creator of things. I started this as a place to put together my thoughts on things that I think deserve a bigger stage than my twitter or GitHub.
I work at Google -- but the things I post here are my own, and don't necessarily reflect Google's views or opinions.
LATEST POSTS
The Von Restorff Effect (sometimes called the Isolation Effect) is a psychological phenomeon that causes people to remember things which defy expectations. In other words, things which stand out in a crowd have a significant compettive advantage.
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If you're running an Apple Silicon Mac (with an M1, M1 Pro, or M1 Max chip), you may be able to speed up VS Code massively with a quick update.
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Buildspace offers free, online, cohort-based courses on building web3 blockchain apps. If you're interested in dipping your toe into the world of Ethereum apps, the blockchain, or NFTs - it's a great starting point.
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For years I did a weekly coding livestream of my React and Python work on Twitch every week, and I'm getting back into it again. This is what sticks out to me as the most valuable learnings from those experiences.
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Let's take a look at the Nullish Coalescing operator (??) in JavaScript, which returns the right operand if the left is null or undefined.
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If you come across array.filter(Boolean) in JavaScript code, never fear! It's a handy bit of functional programming that cleans up arrays with null and undefined values in them.
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Have you noticed that your favorite IDE has been slow to load lately? Try removing these before losing hope.
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Centered text is bad for usability, accessibility, and eye scanning -- and I really hate the way it looks.
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My review of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal
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If you're dealing with Open Graph metadata for your site, and you can't figure out how to get your OG content to update after you make changes, this is your guide.
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Put simply, gitignore.io is a tool that is so profoundly helpful that I've forgotten what life was like without it.
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I added support for mdx to my site, and it's made life much bettter.
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I fully switched my personal site from Google Analytics to Fathom - something that I had been considering for a while, and finally decided to go all in on.
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On my walk this morning, I found myself wondering what it's going to be like when things go back to normal.
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This post came from my work on Surviving Other People's APIs. I've been working on a chapter on Async - the content below came from that writing, but doesn't quite make sense in the context of the book. I didn't want to scrap it entirely, so it's found its way into a blog post. I'd love to know what you think!
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My guess is that if you’re reading this, you’re a newly remote worker, due to the rapid and terrifying expansion of the COVID19 Pandemic. I’m not here share medical advice; if that’s what you’re after, there’s far better places to look.
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If you follow me across the various other social networks I use, you'll likely stumble across my passion for cycling. For the past 8 or so years, road cycling has been my primary form of exercise. I love cycling; it keeps me sane, and helps me live a healthier life, while seeing the world. If you haven't been on a bike recently, you should give it a shot - I can't recommend it enough.
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So, like all good things, the idea for this post comes from a tweet...
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Dependabot is an automation service that will automatically create PRs to keep your projects' dependencies up to date, and it is fucking wonderful.
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This is an article about CSS and usability. The ch unit in CSS was a revelation for me, and I promise that if you don't know about it already, you're gonna love it.
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This is a follow-up to my first post on the upcoming Promise.allSettled() function, coming soon to a node application near you.
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Part 2 in a series of posts on destructuring syntax for JavaScript and Node.
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Promise.allSettled() is a new API coming to the JavaScript / ES6 standard which can help you more efficiently build node applications that make simultaneous asynchronous API calls
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If you're not careful, your node projects can start to fill all the spare disk space on your computer. This one weird trick (lol) can help avoid that.
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Last week I posted about some stickers I designed and had put up for sale to benefit victims of the shooting in Christchurch, NZ. They sold out far, far more quickly than I ever would have guessed.
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Destructuring syntax in es6 (or es2015, etc) JavaScript is a wonderfully useful bit of the language. It allows you to extract values from an Object and assign them to a new variable in one statement -- but it can be confusing to read.
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Uninstalling Postgres database software from a computer running MacOS isn't super straightforward - this is what I found helpful.
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Get yourself some of these eggtastic stickers - 100% of proceeds go to charity!
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An efficient workday is helped tremendously by having a handful of productivity boosters in your quiver. I use these extensions for Chrome to make my day a little nicer.
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Fancy microphones marketed to podcasters are beautiful devices - but their most important function isn't intuitive at all.
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Prettier.js is a fantastic way to systemize and automate your project's code style.
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