Appreciation & Awe When was the last time you used the word "precious" in a non-sarcastic, non-Gollum-quoting way? For whatever reason, it unfortunately seems to have taken on connotations of "fragile" and "weak". The word describes something of great value; something you should not waste or treat carelessly. That describes the last five years, two months and 7 days for me. These years ... Read More

The Cult of the Toxic Hero In the book The Phoenix Project, unplanned work is described as "anti-work". If not addressed, it's the antimatter to the matter of what you want to actually get done. “Like matter and antimatter, in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it.” Company culture has its own antimatter. It may not always ... Read More

Like My Grandpa, With a Big Lawn I've learned some amazing things from code-related blog post titles lately. Apparently React is terrible, because Ember leads to blindness and Angular causes cancer. Backbone is washed out and in rehab, while Knockout is still unconscious. Link bait, after link bait, after bombastic ignorant link bait. Seriously - what planet do we live on? In my lifetime the number of ... Read More

Know When to Walk Away You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away Know when to run... -- "The Gambler", Kenny Rogers Aside from the fact that Kenny Rogers got me into a lot fights as a kid (due to a different song that I absolutely loathe), the key takeaway from the burden of unfortunately ... Read More

machina v0.3.8 Released I just pushed the latest version of machina.js (v0.3.8). I've been working to eliminate some edge case bugs with extended machina.Fsm constructors and it appears we may have squashed the last bug there (until the next one, of course). This is the perfect segue to mention a feature that not many are aware of. When you ... Read More

UMD For Everyone I never thought I'd be one to write a response blog post. Sigh, now I'm that guy. However, I had an interesting conversation on twitter today with Ryan Florence after he said this: I wish everybody would quit screwing around with modules and just use CJS, it is the biggest pain as a library author to deal with this.&mdash ... Read More