b8r 1.0
I decided to make the current revision of b8r “1.0” (it’s still marked “prerelease”) based on the fact it’s proven solid and usable during a year of constant use and improvement. It has been at least...
View ArticleFather’s Day — Picking Sides in Fallout 4
Random Prattle You Can Skip As usual, I’m several years behind in my gaming, and — having pretty much completed Skyrim VR (all the major arcs, anyway) I decided to go back and try Fallout 4 (which had...
View ArticleA Brief Foray into Random Name Generation
I got a bee in my bonnet about name generation this morning, so here’s a simple Javascript module for randomly generating names: /* # NameGenerator Usage: const starNameGenerator = new...
View ArticlePhoto-backup, Hubic, and Other Stories
So, a year ago I started backing up to HubiC after my previous backup service decided to stop servicing retail customers. At the time, HubiC seemed on paper like a great option — potentially offering...
View ArticleLost Productivity
A couple of months ago I listened to a Planet Money podcast discussing the mysterious slowdown in US productivity growth (the link is to one of several podcasts on this topic). Like most NPR content,...
View ArticleEpic Fail
Atul Gawande describes the Epic software system being rolled out in America’s hospitals. It reads like a potpourri of everything bad about enterprise IT. Standardize on endpoints instead of...
View ArticleRAW Power 2.0
My favorite tool for quickly making adjustments to RAW photos just turned 2.0. It’s a free upgrade but the price for new users has increased to (I believe) $25. While the original program was great for...
View ArticleAs the Wwworm Turns
Microsoft’s recent announcement that it is, in effect, abandoning the unloved and unlamented Edge browser stack in favor of Chromium is, well, both hilarious and dripping in irony. Consider at first...
View Articleb8r v2
Having developed b8r in a period of about two weeks after leaving Facebook (it was essentially a distillation / brain-dump of all the opinions I had formed about writing front-end code while working...
View ArticleD&D5e, Web-components, & Performance
tl;dr — web-components (edit: with shadowRoots) are kind of slow. Over the long weekend I was hoping to play some D&D with my kids (it never ended up happening). One of the things I find pretty...
View ArticleMore on web-components and perf
tl;dr web-components are only slow if they have a shadowRoot. My intention with the upcoming version of b8r is to replace b8r’s components with web-components, and my previous test showed that...
View ArticleFarewell require, you’re no longer needed…
This is a really technical article about front-end javascript programming. You have been warned. Background For most of the last two years, I have written my front-end code using my own implementation...
View ArticleMigrating b8r code to the New World Order
I’ve got three small projects built with b8r lying around (one is something I did for a job interview a few months ago, so it’s not in a public repo). Anyway, all three simply load the version of b8r...
View ArticleUse of Weapons, Revisited
I just finished listening to Use of Weapons. I first read it shortly after it was published, and it remains my favorite book — well, maybe second to Excession — by Iain M. Banks (who is sorely missed),...
View ArticleEon and π
One important spoiler! (Again, it’s a great book. Go read it.) Another of my favorite SF books from the 80s and 90s is Greg Bear’s Eon. At one point it seemed to me that Greg Bear was looking through...
View ArticleBlender 2.8 is coming
There aren’t many pieces of open source software that have been under continuous active development that haven’t gone through a single “major version change” in twenty years. When I started using...
View Articlesnake_case, camelCase, and other Misadventures in Coding Standards
some_programmers_like_snake_case while othersPreferCamelCase (and dont-talk-to-me-about-css-or-html) but life really becomes entertaining when different programmers — sorry “software engineers” —...
View ArticleDark Mode with CSS Variables
As little as four or so years ago, it was widely understood among front-end developers that CSS was a horrible problem, managing it was a nightmare, and Something Ought to be Done About It. Back then,...
View Articleb8r goes pure(ish) Javascript
In an effort to make b8r work in the universe of “everything must be javascript” web development tools, I’ve finally added provision for pure javascript components in b8r. Now, there’s four really good...
View ArticleUndo
If there’s one feature almost every non-trivial application should have which is overlooked, left as an exercise, or put aside as “too hard” by web frameworks, it’s undo. I do not have much (any) love...
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