Front-End Engineering in a Back-end World — Note: I’m not representing Amazon in any way with this post, it’s just my personal opinion. Front-End Engineering in a Back-end World I spent a lot of years thinking big tech companies were evil and claimed to love the hectic startup life, but the truth is I had convinced myself I could never get a job…

I’ve blogged about being a self-taught engineer before and also about some of the accompanying struggles I’ve had trying to fit the mold… — Note: I’m not representing Amazon in any way with this post. It’s just my personal experience and opinion. I’ve blogged about being a self-taught engineer before and also about some of the accompanying struggles I’ve had trying to fit the mold expected to land a job in tech, especially at…

Beginnings — In the 7th grade I convinced my Grandma to buy me a student copy of Visual Studio. I used to lug the accompanying Visual Basic book around at school. After getting kicked out of gym class I would sit in the office for that period and read it every day. …

Thanksgiving 2017 I was hanging out with family in near Las Vegas and generally having a great time, but I couldn’t stop thinking about… — Thanksgiving 2017 I was hanging out with family near Las Vegas and generally having a great time, but I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe I should go back to school. I was never actually good at school. I have a degree in Community, Environment and Planning from the University of…

AnxietyTech is a new conference I’m organizing to discuss cutting edge technology and mental health. Everyone working in tech needs to… — AnxietyTech is a new conference I’m organizing to discuss cutting edge technology and mental health. Everyone working in tech needs to attend! This is absolutely the time to have these discussions and build the community that’s going to end up making such a big difference for so many people’s lives.

A few years ago I gave a talk at MountainWest JS called Error Handling in node.js. In that talk I extolled the virtues of creating custom… — A few years ago I gave a talk at MountainWest JS called Error Handling in node.js. In that talk I extolled the virtues of creating custom error objects by extending the built-in Error type. Most of the content was inspired by Guillermo’s seminal A String is Not an Error. …

Back in April I shifted into a platform/architect role in my job at PayPal. I was tasked with looking at stability, performance and… — Back in April I shifted into a platform/architect role in my job at PayPal. I was tasked with looking at stability, performance and quality. One of the first things I did was graph our JavaScript bundle sizes over time. After a couple of weeks I noticed at several points we…

Inspired by the Zeit team’s post on the subject, my team at PayPal recently migrated our main server-side codebase to use Async/Await. I’m… — Inspired by the Zeit team’s post on the subject, my team at PayPal recently migrated our main server-side codebase to use Async/Await. I’m excited to share with you some of things we learned along the way. Let’s start with some terminology: Async function Await keyword

This is the follow up to a post I wrote recently called From Require.js to Webpack — Part 1 (the why) which was published in my personal blog. In that post I talked about 3 the main reasons my team decided to move from require.js to webpack: Common JS support …