This blog has long featured the ability to subscribe by email, so you could get an email notification when a new post was published. I’ve used various services over the years to achieve this, first with FeedBurner and later with Zapier. As I’m a do-it-yourself kind of person, I never liked relying on external services... […]

Not too long ago I moved this site from a custom setup on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Netlify[1]. My AWS setup was a bit cumbersome, consisting of a Jenkins machine that pulled from a private GitHub repository, built the site using Jekyll[2], and published the result to S3. The benefit of this setup over... […]

If you’re like me, you probably use a lot of open source tools every day without thinking about how they got started. Few projects share the “why” of their creation: the actual problem they were trying to solve and when they first came across that problem. You can, of course, benefit from open source projects... […]

Compared to ECMAScript 6 (also known as ECMAScript 2015), ECMAScript 2016 was a minor update to the language specification for JavaScript. This was due to the decision that ECMAScript editions would now move to a yearly release cycle, effectively just a snapshot of all the features that were ready. As such, most resources list only... […]

One of the most long-awaited features of ECMAScript 6 is the formal definition of modules as part of the language. For years, JavaScript developers have struggled with organizing their code and needing to decide between alternate ad-hoc module formats like RequireJS, AMD, and CommonJS. Formally defining modules as part of JavaScript will eliminate a lot... […]

I’m a big fan of npm scripts[1] and have been using them in all of my projects instead of a standalone build system. The feature I like the most from npm scripts is the ability to run command line executables that are installed in your project’s node_modules/.bin directory. That allows you to, for example, install... […]

It’s hard for me to believe, but I first conceived and created ESLint[1] in June 2013 and first announced it’s availability in July 2013[2]. As frequent readers might recall, the primary goal of ESLint was to create a linter with rules that could be loaded at runtime. I had seen some problems in our JavaScript... […]

I’ve been doing web development since 2000, and in that time I’ve seen eras marked by libraries and frameworks come and go. The Ajax era began around the same time as the jQuery era began, the Backbone era began several years later, and the React era really began about two years ago. Each of these... […]

When you think of open source software, you might think of a few specific projects depending on your area of interest. If you work on web applications, the term “open source” might conjure up visions of Apache or Node.js; if you’re into big data, then perhaps Hadoop comes to mind; if you care a lot... […]