As Scott O'Brien always says, JavaScript is bad.  In all seriousness, our front-ends wind up bloated, really quickly, which leads to poor performance.   We mostly aim to keep the package sizes down to get to the first meaningful paint as fast as possible, but less JavaScript also means less time parsing it.  With my latest project, I opted for a React stack, but I am doing my best to keep dependencies down (sorry, not sorry Redux!), but some things are too useful to avoid.  A few months in, and

I was having a discussion with a fellow software engineer, and he asked something to the effect of "Why does software always become a mess?"  We talked about how the problem can be seen across the industry, and how premature-abstraction is partly to blame. But the most significant thing we noted is: > When you open up a software project to the democratic process, everyone has a say, and you lose a single direction. At first, I thought maybe engineers are just bored.  That would explain why we

A few years ago I was in a leads meeting; all engineering leads and higher go to it, so it also included managers, directors, the VP, even the CTO.  My team had asked me about getting more whiteboard space, so I wanted to bring it up.  Oddly enough, it became one of the most frustrating experiences in my career, yeah... all because of a whiteboard. It was for a well funded and successful startup, we spent loads of money on more frivolous things like parties; I didn't think I'd find any objectio

> So you were just promoted and aren't sure what to do?  Let's talk about it. How did you get here? You woke up and... surprise! You're a lead engineer now, congrats! Before the panic sets in, you need to know: you were chosen for a reason. Chances are you report to someone that oversees a bunch of teams and they need to scale, so they need someone they can trust, to be their eyes and ears. Your manager only has so much time in a day and they don't want to stay awake until 1 AM, at least for wo