Last week, I tweeted something that got quite a few surprising responses: In 2019, one of the things I’m going to do is stop exporting things as default from my CommonJS/ES6 modules. Importing a default export has grown to feel like a guessing game where I have a 50/50 chance of being wrong each time.... […]

Back in 2009, I challenged myself to write one blog post per week for the entire year. I had read that the best way to gain more traffic to a blog was to post consistently. One post per week seemed like a realistic goal due to all the article ideas I had but it turned... […]

It’s 2018 and somehow women are still getting paid less than men, even in supposedly progressive industries like software.[1] Whether that be from companies offering women less than men for the same position, women being less likely to negotiate or less successful in negotiations, or any of the other myriad reasons, the results are still... […]

If you’ve worked on a Node.js command-line program, you were probably faced with the extraction of command line arguments. Node.js provides all command line arguments in the process.argv array. However, the contents of the array aren’t what you might expect. What’s in process.argv? The first two items in process.argv are: The path to the executable... […]

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... […]