A Job Search Retrospective — In early spring of 2020, I had lived my dream: three years as a writer and scholar, composing a collection of essays. Now, at 30 years old, I’d done it; I’d written a book. And I only had 50 years plus or minus 20 left to live. I spent a…

When I taught English, I was concerned, in general, with the place and function of technology in first-year composition classrooms. More specifically, I was looking for the ways in which feedback is received online, and how computer interfaces affect student uptake and perceptions of feedback. However, this line of inquiry…

Since I wrote about garbage collection last week, I’ve been thinking about the subtleties of memory. I, like many, non-traditional programmers, have learned about computer science from the top down (maybe middle to top to bottom if we include learning the fundamentals of OOP). I made my first rails project…

Once upon a time, in the age of C, low-level programming languages, languages that hewed closer to the hardware, required something of developers that virtually no modern high-level language demands: memory management. We had to tell the computer ahead of time how much memory we would need, and it was…

2020 was a good year… wait, wait, hear me out. 2020 was a good year for UI design. While the planet was burning, and society was consumed by a pandemic, the internet got sleek. From the deep box-shadow retro look, to scroll-based animations, to gradient text color and the return…

One of the Web’s most central and lofty ideals is that of universal access. Advances in technology have created unprecedented access to information, entertainment, and community. However, that unprecedented access is still far from universal, and it can be easy for an able-bodied user or developer to neglect the…

Practical Starting Points for Your First Jamstack Project — At the 2016 SmashingConf in San Francisco, Matt Biilmann of Netlify offered his vision for the future of web development. More accurately, he described and formalized a process that was already underway. In this emergent present, web developers capitalized on tools offered by 3rd party APIs, CMS, and CDNs to…

Why Tech Should Value the Liberal Arts Experience || Part Three — Craft and Process I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do…

Basic Strategies and Principles for a Less Stressful Debugging Experience — “If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, programming must be the process of putting them in.” — Edsger Dijkstra Bugs. They’re inevitable. In the same way that most writing is revision, most programming demands debugging. That means developers get lots of opportunities to confront our own understanding. It’s…