Notes from the work
An archive of product, engineering, startups, and the decisions behind building software. Older posts stay dated; they are here as a record, not a publishing schedule.
Most of the products I’ve created in my lifetime have been software related products. Software products are inherently iterative. You find bugs. You fix bugs. Customers request features. You build those features. Strategy dictates different features for different markets. You build those different features. I never thought physical products would also be iterative. But they […]
Sometimes, you second guess yourself. This happened tonight for me. I’m working on an application that tracks team health. It’s my project for February. Part of creating12.com. A few days ago, my friend Jay mentioned it would be cool as a Slack application. I thought that was an intriguing idea. I looked at the slack […]
I am creating 12 products in 12 months.You can follow my progress at http://creating12.com How is this going down? This has already started. My first project has launched at Inspiremarks.com. It’s a printing of startup themed bookmarks. I love them! I think they are the perfect bookmarks – at least for me. I will continue […]
You want to work with D3, but you don’t understand how SVGs are rendered in the browser. This makes it very difficult to understand HTML code that D3 outputs. Let’s tackle some of these issues. The code we will be looking at today was generated by D3. However, in this example, we’re not looking at […]
D3.js does two things: (1) It adds HTML to a page and (2) it binds data to that HTML. That’s it. The simplest example of this you will ever see of D3 data are bar charts binded to pixel size. Most examples of D3 in the wild use SVGs or Path html elements. Understanding those […]
A linter is formally classified as a Static Code Analysis tool. It is usually a command line tool and it parses a project’s code to look for patterns. It then checks the patterns it finds against generally accepted standards (or custom rules you think are important). The primary purposes of a linter are to find […]
The initial problem: I wanted to add SSL to this blog The first obstacle: My Godaddy hosting is 15 years old and I don’t have the ability to add an SSL certificate. I don’t have access to cpanel or another means of adding an SSL certificate. The solution: Migrating this blog from Godaddy to Bluehost. […]
You should always improving, but should you strengthen a strength or improve a weakness? Getting better is difficult. You need to make time to improve. I’m pretty good at that. What I’m not good at is picking an area to work on. On any given evening, I’ll think to myself, “Should I strengthen a strength […]
In my current role as Director of Product Engineering at FINCURA, I’m often thinking about our front end architecture. For our front end application, we use Angular, with our main concerns being: reliability, testability, and speed to develop new features. To address these concerns, we’ve developed the following architecture. Angular architecture comes down to three […]
/Good naming is important. It helps developers read code faster. Hard to read code is the biggest impediment to moving fast. Developers spend 10x more time reading code than writing code. Well named methods are the easiest way to increase developer velocity. Good code should read like a story. One important part of this is […]