Space Ninja

Books I Loved in 2020

Once a year, I review the books I read and write a brief post recommending my favorites. 2020 was a brutal, horrible year, and I had almost no mental bandwidth for reading, but I did read three books that I absolutely loved. Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn MuirThis was on

television

TV Shows I Loved in 2020

2020 sucked, but at least there were some good shows to distract us, from the Mandalorian, to Letterkenny, to What We Do In The Shadows

pandemic

A Typical Day in Early 2021

I thought it’d be interesting to show people what it’s like to work from home with kids who are also doing school from home.

git

Quick Tip: How to Hide Whitespace Changes in Git Diffs

If you’ve ever had to review a PR where the only code change is adding a wrapper element, you’ll be familiar with the pain of reviewing what appears to be a massive change but is actually trivial.

responsive

Responsive Images the Simple Way

The responsive images spec is fantastic and covers a lot of use cases, but most of the time you’ll only need one: resolution switching using the `srcset` and `sizes` attributes.

television

What to Watch while Social Distancing

A friend of mine recently asked "What's good on Netflix right now? What are y'all watching?"

npm

How to Publish an Updated Version of an npm Package

What’s typically involved in an npm version release? How can you determine the release process for an existing project? Can project maintainers do anything to make it easier for new contributors?

npm

How to Automatically Update Your JavaScript Dependencies

One frustrating aspect of the modern JavaScript ecosystem is keeping all your dependencies up to date. Thankfully, there are automated tools that can handle this thankless task for you.

books

Books I Loved in 2019

Once a year, I like to look back over my reading history and write a brief recommendation of my favorites. Partly I do this for anyone who might trust my judgement on what to read, but mostly it's because I have a terrible memory. I have books on my shelves

productivity

22 Panels That Always Work: Wally Wood’s Legendary Productivity Hack

Comic book artist Wally Wood’s “22 Panels That Always Work” is a legendary bit of productivity hacking. How can you reduce “noodling” in your work?

git

Squashing Your Pull Requests

Most pull requests should squash down to a single commit with a well-written message explaining why a change is happening.

job hunting

React-ing to Change

Exactly one year ago today, I was laid off. At the time I was working for Say Media, a small media company that was acquired by Maven, “a relatively unknown start-up run by two notorious media fuck boys.” I was caught in the first round of layoffs related to the

npm

How to Distribute a Pattern Library as an npm Package from a Private Git Repo

So you’ve got a pattern library: Congratulations! The next step is making it possible for other people to use those patterns. You could simply provide download links for the CSS and other assets, but then your users can’t easily get any updates to the pattern library. Instead, you

frontend

Friday Front-End’s Top Links in 2018

In 2018, Friday Front-End shared a curated list of five articles and one video every week. Here are the links that were most popular.

books

Books I Loved in 2018

I read 25 books this year. Many were good, but the following three series stood heads and tails above everything else. I devoured them all and enjoyed every word. It’s not often I find series that I’m happy to recommend without any caveats or “if you like this

books

Books I Love: The Kingkiller Chronicle Series

It’s no exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind might be my favorite book of all time. It’s in competition with heavy hitters like Hitchhiker’s Guide, The Lord of the Rings, and Ringworld. Books I come back to time and again, re-reading compulsively,

css

What is Modular CSS?

Modular CSS is a collection of principles for writing code that is performant and maintainable at scale.

books

Books I Love: The Expanse Series

Set in a near future where we’ve settled the solar system, but simmering tension between Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt could boil over into war at any moment, and a cosmic wild card threatens to destroy everything.

books

Books I Love: The Gentleman Bastards Series

I have difficulty expressing how much I love Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and all the other books in the Gentleman Bastards series. They’re fantastically well-constructed and funny heist stories.

books

Books I Love: The Culture Series

The Culture is a post-scarcity socialist utopia. Banks described them as “hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.”

design

Do Siegel’s Seven Deadly Sins Hold Up?

In 1996, David Siegel’s book Creating Killer Web Sites was at the top of the charts on Amazon, and it quickly became the gold standard of web design books. Siegel may not have been the first to write about spacer gifs, slicing images, and table-based layouts, but he certainly

quotes

Great Programming Quotes

“If you put in the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” …I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

books

Books I Loved in 2017

I read 28 books in 2017. These are the ones I would happily recommend. Not a ton of new books to recommend this year, because I also was finishing reading the Harry Potter series with my daughter, and re-reading The Lies of Locke Lamora series, which I’ve recommended elsewhere.

movies

How to Export Movie Ratings from Netflix and Import into IMDb

When Netflix switched from a 5-star rating scheme to a thumbs up/down model, I realized I was sitting on more than a decade of ratings, and worried they would disappear. I started rating movies on Netflix because back then, ratings drove their recommendation engine. The more films you rated,

frontend

Front-End Newsletters

A friend recently asked me how I keep up-to-date on what's happening in the front-end community. It's a great question. It used to be that RSS feeds were the way to go. I'd subscribe to the feeds from my favorite developers, and get their updates. Sadly, many people don't post