It’s hard for me to overstate how much my coding has improved since embracing automated testing. And yet, I used to think of it as a waste of time! This post is for my former self, demonstrating why I embrace the practice now. Allow me to demonstrate with an example. Let’s say I’m adding job cancellation to a work queue. Jobs could be canceled at any time (including mid-execution), so it’s complex

I once wrote about how I've stopped nit-picking in code reviews , which improved the signal-to-noise ratio and helped everyone get along better. I’m back with a third reason to ditch the practice: nit-picking wastes time . By definition, nitpicks are about minor problems: poorly named variables, slightly confusing logic, bits of duplicated code, that sort of thing. (If the feedback was about major

Like many software developers, I’ve been considering the future of my profession in the face of AI. AI can write code. Our job is to write code. It seems natural that we’d be replaced by AI, no? But recently I've been considering the warning we give to up-and-coming hot shot coders. Folks flying through college, winning coding competitions, and slaying algorithms. We tell them: there’s more to sof

I’ve been a rhythm game fiend since my introduction to Dance Dance Revolution in the early 2000s. I spent years obsessed with DDR, took a detour into Beatmania, then played Guitar Hero / Rock Band nonstop for years. I haven’t gone deep on any rhythm games recently, but I check in on the genre from time to time. 2025 was a fascinating year because three rhythm games were released that were differen

For better or worse, my life has become infested by Jest mocks. I come from the land of dependency injection ( I even gave a talk once !), but whenever I talk about dependency injection to JavaScript developers I get this reaction: Instead, mocking is king. Unfortunately, I’ve found Jests’s API to be confusing and the docs largely unhelpful . I thought I could get by winging it but that never work

This is a writeup of a talk I gave at Minnebar 20 . Originally, I threw in some Matrix references to make the talk more fun & engaging. Those jokes work better in person, so I’ve mostly omitted the Matrix from this writeup (though some vestiges remain). It seems like every time I log into a website these days, I get one of these fucking screens asking me use passkeys: So far, I've ignored these we

Journalists, I beg of you: please stop confusing unsold eBay listings for actual sales. I’m ticked off after seeing this Patch post about NYC MetroCards selling for $5,000 and this WSJ article about Trader Joe’s totes going for $50,000 . Yes, someone listed these items for absurdly high prices ( MetroCard , tote bag ). But no one has actually bought them at those prices! On eBay, people can list a

During the pandemic my weird vice/obsession became Displates (metal wall art hung up by magnets): Some of my Displates (along with other tchotchkes in my office) For me, part of the hobby was poking holes in their website. I’ve long stopped trying to give their devs heartburn, so I figured I’d document some of my hacking highlights. Limited Edition Displates Some context is required: there are nor

My most recent “just for fun” project was to find the least erratic of the Erratic decks in Balatro (a poker-ish roguelike deckbuilder game). Before each game, you pick a deck that has a special power. The Erratic deck completely randomizes the ranks/suits of the cards (such that you could end up with 10 aces, or 25 spades, etc). I was curious: what’s the least erratic deck (i.e., the most cards o

It’s likely that, at some point, you've had shitty audio during video meetings. Why? Because you don’t get immediate feedback for audio issues . With video, you can instantly see if your image is out of focus or if you’re not in the frame. You can’t easily tell if your microphone is unplugged, you’ve set the wrong inputs, or it’s too loud in the coffee shop - there’s no direct feedback mechanism.

Let me tell you a story about why one should be cautious with databases that track the real world. I play trombone in a local community orchestra . For the past two years, I’ve been the board secretary; part of my duties is keeping a roster of who is in the orchestra. We’ve got a database (aka spreadsheet). I’m an organized person. Simple enough, right? Wrong! Keeping an up-to-date, accurate roste

Most of my programming ventures begin with a single line of code I’m curious about. Who is calling the code, and how does this code fit into the larger jigsaw puzzle? As a result, “find usages”, “go to declaration”, and “go to implementations” are three of my most often used IDE features. I use them to jump between caller and callee, interface and implementation, functions and the tests that verif

Software development (or, you know, life in general) is all about juggling priorities. For this post, I’m thinking specifically about code design priorities . You only have a limited amount of time to implement a feature, so you have to pick and choose which aspects of it to spend time on. Do you spend your hours crafting the perfect architecture? Optimizing the shit out of it? Writing automated t

As a summary, here's what I'm voting this year on my Edina, MN ballot (along with links to research on why I'm voting that way): For all partisan races (president, senate, house/state reps) - the DFL candidate . Statewide constitutional amendment - Yes . County Commissioner District 6 - Heather Edelson Mayor (Edina) - James B. Hovland Council Member (Edina) - Carolyn Jackson & James Pierce Chief J

Another post about local Edina politics, this time the city council race. There are three candidates for two open positions; you get to vote for two: Ryan Daye Carolyn Jackson (incumbent) James Pierce (incumbent) Carolyn Jackson Let’s get the easy one out of the way first. Jackson has been on the council for four years now and is running for re-election. She was far and away my favorite candidate