Blog ← Designated Nerd ← Software and Lasered Goods

How Browserify Lets You Use NPM Packages In Simple Websites

Nov

14

2021

I’ve been trying to help my wife use a Javascript package that’s only got npm install as its instructions for how to get started. For people who aren’t JS devs (ie, me and her), that’s not really sufficient to actually get something used in a website the way you would by importing a library.js file ...

Wisco Disco

Jul

29

2019

As a rather brief follow-up to my previous post, I wanted to share: We’re moving to Madison, Wisconsin! It’s been a little hard to describe to non-Americans where in the hell that is beyond “In the middle and towards the north”, so here is a helpful illustration: I’m glad we’re only going to be three ...

What’s Next 1

Jun

1

2019

I moved to the Netherlands in August of 2017 when Lilia (then my girlfriend, now my fiancée) got a two year fellowship at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and kindly allowed me to tag along. I’ve tremendously enjoyed living in the Netherlands, but we made the decision to move back to the US in the fall ...

For Kim

Aug

22

2016

Many of you in the iOS community know Daniel Steinberg. Even if you don’t know him personally, you’ve probably seen one of his many outstanding talks about Swift. If you know him personally, you know that Daniel is a wonderful, warm, kind person. As many of you have already heard, Daniel’s wife Kim passed away after a car accident ...

Don’t Work When You’re Sick

Oct

11

2015

The Cubs-Cardinals baseball game last night gave a good example of why you don’t want to work when you’re sick. Pitcher Jaime Garcia had finally made it back to the majors after years of rehab for various injuries, and he wasn’t about to let a nasty stomach virus stop him from starting his first playoff ...

The Future Of Mobile: The Finished(?) Product

Jul

26

2015

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed slides to #SlideDeckKaraoke talk for SeanCon yesterday. Particular thanks to Isaac for some delightfully devious work putting this together, and my girlfriend Lilia for agreeing to film it with my phone at the last second. I’ve added some subtitles to the bits for which I am not speaking English. ...

Slide Deck Karaoke

Jul

6

2015

I date and live with a lovely woman who works as a post-doctoral researcher in a big psychology/linguistics lab at the University of Chicago. One of things the folks in her lab do to entertain themselves is something called Slide Deck Karaoke: Slides pertaining to a topic are collected, and then the presenter has to ...

The Power Of Working Code

Feb

16

2015

I like to give my partner Aaron a bit of shit about his Objective-C code. It’s the work of someone who’s only been wrapping his head around Objective-C for a year and a half – not someone who’s been using it full-time for four years. It’s copy-pasta, it’s poorly architected, it’s sometimes taking 400 steps ...

Assumptions != NSNotFound

Nov

16

2014

I couldn’t figure out why an equivalent of this code: kept having a bunch of crashes in “String was found, do stuff” section of the code in Hum. Turns out, messages to nil which return a struct will return with all of the members of the struct initialized to zero. If passedInVariable was nil, rangeOfString ...

Collection Data Types In Swift: Detailed Test Results

Nov

4

2014

I wrote a piece for RayWenderlich.com about Collection Data Structures in Swift, and I did a whole lot of performance testing around it that didn’t have room to make it into that piece. I’m going to be going into waaaaay more detail and burying you in charts in this blog post if you want to ...