Data requires context to create meaning. Let’s say I sent you a text message containing just <3. Perhaps you had first asked me how many of something I had. In that case you'd interpret <3 as something like, "I don't know exactly, but less than three". Or perhaps your prior…

I recently had a catastrophic crash of my desktop, so it was time for a fresh Windows 10 install. Which also meant getting my development environment set back up. Modern webdev environments have a lot going on, especially when you throw Docker into the mix, and there are always a…

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) has rapidly become the favored editor/IDE for a huge swath of web developers. This is in no small part due to its robust extensions marketplace and the fact that you can change how pretty much every little aspect works. I’ve been using it for the past…

Matching your development and production environments can save a lot of headache. In webdev our production environments are usually some flavor of Linux. While I love using Linux (I spent a couple years mostly using Ubuntu), the reality is that I often need Windows-only software. …

Apple just announced their “App Store Small Business Program”, wherein companies making less than $1 million/year can keep 85% instead of 70% of revenue (the system is a bit less straightforward than that, but that’s the gist). That announcement has created a lot of buzz, and a lot of questions…

If we don’t solve the problems of our past, the futures that we want become ever more difficult to obtain. That’s true in life, and it’s true in software. In life, the past comes in the form of baggage. In software, we call that “technical debt”. For both life and…