I made up a dumb little error code idea last year to help solve a problem every web app has. The problem is this. When a user encounters an error in a complicated part of your app—let’s say a part where three or four smaller parts could have failed—you don’t want to blast them in the face with a huge, technical error. ERROR: The fetch() call to...
When I first started making web apps—way back when they were called “websites”, which consisted of these ancient things called “web pages”, which were files made by people called “web masters” (yeesh)—there was more or less a standard way to serve them. You rented a little space at a hosting provider, and then either they, or you, would run...
Ijoined a new gym last week. I went to the LA Fit Expo the weekend before, and this new independent gym had set up a booth and given me a free day pass. So I tried them out in person, liked it, and joined. I was what marketing people might call a “textbook conversion”. The gym is so goddamn nice by the way, it’s bonkers. Anyway, they have you...
Almost everyone who makes web apps seems to hate web apps, I’ve noticed. And, more specifically, they hate the complexity that manages to find its way into doing anything, no matter how simple. A modern web app that just says “Hello world!” requires like five thousand times more computing power to render than the entire Apollo space program used...
The “app ecosystem”, as it exists today, is hopelessly broken. Around the start of the pandemic I started cooking more, and shortly thereafter decided I wanted a recipe app. This idea immediately made me cringe. Just thinking about having to search “best recipe apps” on Google, getting 200 identical clickbait-and-popups-website results, going to...
I’ve had some trouble researching “git versioning strategies” in the past. Part of the trouble is searching Google, whose current search algorithms so ruthlessly optimize for “most people search THIS, so that’s what you must’ve meant” and “here is the one-sentence result that our Google Assistant can read to you from your smart microwave” that...
This is not a typical blog post of mine. It’s just a note to self. See, I realized my blog is actually the best format I have to save a long-form note with code snippets, so I’m just going to use it to remember how I set up a private VPN for my wife to watch This Country on the BBC iPlayer, in case I ever need to do it again. If you find yourself...
Developing and maintaining a successful web app sometimes requires decisions that are really big and highly complex. Like routing, linting, testing, CI/CD strategies, etc… Those things could each be their own six-part blog post, and you’d still barely scratch the surface. Other times these decisions are tiny, clever tricks you can start using...
This is the first installment in the Journey to 0.x series, where we find very old versions of popular software to better understand the deep concepts behind how they work. Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed in software. You hear about a new platform or library. Over time you hear about it more and more often. Maybe you try it out for a small project,...
I’ve found, generally, that the first established app you work on when you start writing code will come to represent, in your head, an almost mythical level of complexity, advanced architecture and, above all, stability that you’ll forever feel is unattainable within your own apps. That very first big project you’re allowed to contribute to in a...