Thanks to an extended holiday vacation and some family illnesses, I was lucky enough to spend two weeks reading about how people and teams learn. It was really interesting. Why read about learning? A few months ago, I started working at Stripe. It has felt like Neo getting plugged into the training modules. Except…

Let’s escape the day-to-day to survey what’s coming next — Very early in my programming career, I read a transcript of the talk “You and Your Research”, by Richard Hamming, a mathematician whose name appears in the title of at least six Wikipedia pages for important things he invented. I was struck by a question which he persistently asked of…

I gave a talk at tonight’s ReactJS Denver meetup about Preact. Part 1 describes Preact, why you might want to use it, and the tradeoffs you have to make by not using full React. Part 2 walks through what Preact is doing internally to render and diff a simple application…

Or: what Souders’ books didn’t tell you because it only happened in the last two years. — (This is a blog version of a presentation I gave at work a few weeks ago. Because I talked about a couple internal-only things, I can’t put up the video, but I hope it is worthwhile to share the slides and some notes.) This presentation is focused on bringing you…

And some suggestions from a complete outsider — Yesterday I published a post arguing that more programmers should learn about Concurrent ML. Especially for UI development, CML offers better abstractions and some ready-made solutions for problems that are currently hard or ugly to solve. But experts in this material may have noticed something odd about my post: I…

Or: what is Concurrent ML all about? — In this post I’d like to introduce you to a powerful idea for thinking about concurrent programs. Synchronizable abstractions were developed more than twenty years ago by John Reppy in his work creating the language Concurrent ML. …

How the virtual dom actually gets rendered to the DOM — So far in this series, we’ve gotten a feel for the Preact repo and looked at the component model from a high level. When we left off last time, we had just finished our picture of the muturally-recursive process of diffing virtual DOM trees and rendering components: And we had…

What distinguishes the React component model, the difference between functional and class-based components, and an overview of how it all works. — In the first post in this series, we started to build a mental model of the Preact codebase, explored some fringe code for utilities and global options, and saw how JSX becomes virtual dom trees. …

An introduction and gentle first steps in a series where we’ll read the Preact codebase and try to completely understand it. — About the series I assume you are already familiar with the React component model and virtual dom rendering. A first React book or online course should be enough background. I also assume you know what Preact is and are interested in it either to make your applications load faster or just because you…