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…

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…

(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…

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…

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. …

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…

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. …