process - Ethical Developer

Creation Myths

The more I work and think about web development, the more I think that the mystical, magical state of starting from zero and creating an innovative language, framework or web app "from scratch" is a well cultivated, but false, myth. Everything starts

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Making Small Changes to Solve Big Problems

Do I have an affinity for JavaScript, because it is the first programming language that I learned at a respectable level of detail? Or is there more to it? I think there is. So much of what I like about contemporary JavaScript development hinges

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Web Development: Process and Product

It seems to me, that my workflow benefits most from a posture focused on the process of web development, rather than exclusively the set of deliverables that compose a final product. It seems that this is not a unique point of view. But it

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Lessons in Jugaad

This article from the New York Times is great. Here are a few takeaways which translate from the world of space exploration on the cheap, to web development. "Ours is a contrasting, inexpensive and innovative approach to the very complex mission...Yet it

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You Can't Force Open Source

I've been inadvertently living off of the progress made by the open source community for my entire career as a web developer. And while I haven't given back nearly as much as I should, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about

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This Front End Ops Animal

Up front, this blog post would not exist without the amazing work and progress towards pushing the Front End Ops agenda by such trailblazers as Wesley Hales and Ryan Bridges, who gave a cool talk at the Velocity 2013 conference in Santa Clara, California.

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An Open Stack, from Top to Bottom

What would it mean for all of us to use an open stack, from top to bottom? Once we loose our paranoid grasp on straws made up of proprietary systems, what is left for us to hold? Would we float free for a moment,

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Tend to the Garden

There's really only one thing that will doom the codebase, and that is neglect. As you know, there is an abundance of tools and libraries out there, especially in the JavaScript community. Sometimes you're locked into using older versions for any number of reasons,

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Refactoring the Process

The best managers I have had do two things well: they remove impediments to a trusted developer's understanding of the larger business purpose behind that developer's task, and they, as proficient developers in their own right, approach solving problems in what seems to me

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In Deference to the Human Interest

I don't think it's a stretch to acknowledge that there are plenty of problems that humankind faces that just will not be solved by the Internet. Which then begs the question: what problems, if any, are worth solving? The Internet is a network. And

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Belling the Cat

Are we on track for a future where the skills of a developer will become all but ubiquitous? Will there still be a place for product managers and UX designers unless they are not merely conversant in the tools of a developer, but proficient?

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User Experience is Nothing New...

(...though it can lead to extraordinary results.) The fact that you can get a group of professionals, like engineers, who stereotypically can have the tendency to be singularly, rationally focused, to start thinking in terms of personal experience, emotion, and storytelling as being of

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Your Moment of DevZen

Some code you live with for the long haul, some is more ephemeral. The thing is, it may not be immediately apparent which is which! Make it maintainable and give it structure, but don't get too precious or build brittle systems that are hard

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Checklist for Code Design

When cooking up a new batch of code, it helps to ask these questions... Does the code make a product useful? Does the code help make a product understandable? Is the code itself understandable? Does the code have the potential to be long-lasting? Is

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End to End User Experience

"End to End User Experience"...the idea that all developers, not just those who develop the UI (and the designers they partner with), need to safeguard the quality of the user experience. I really truly believe that the optimum user experience can