Reading Time: 4 minutes Folks who get to know me usually (and regrettably) discover that I am a language nerd. I like learning languages and I like learning about languages. There’s all sorts of things that are fascinating about languages: where they come from, why they sound a certain way, why grammar is what it is. But lately, I’ve

Reading Time: 8 minutes In 2023 where servers are cheap and platforms are free, it’s ridiculously easy for anyone to set up a blog and start flinging words at the web. You can become a “blogger” in the time it takes for Starbucks to make your low-fat half soy milk decaf mocha cherry mint latte frappuccino. There’s no one

Reading Time: 9 minutes There have been two things that have appeared in newer versions of JavaScript that I haven’t understood: Symbols and Iterators. When it comes to code I have to learn by doing, no amount of reading Mozilla Developer Network was going to help me understand Symbols. So I finally decided to stop reading articles, crack open

Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s a seldom-discussed concept in web software development called cyclomatic complexity which is a metric used to indicate how complex a program or unit of code is. It’s not discussed very often because, well, it’s really not exciting. You can get VS Code plugins that will measure the cyclomatic complexity and they can be somewhat

Reading Time: 4 minutes A few years back I ran into a difficult situation on a project: I needed to find out where a particular CSS selector was used. I had a static version of the site, and so I did what any fool might do and I tried searching for it in my IDE. I had two problems

Reading Time: 3 minutes While I generally avoid TypeScript, I’m willing to acknowledge that there might be edge cases where it could be useful. And in an effort to actually learn how to make it useful, I’m converting one of my linguistic / NLP node packages to TypeScript (Methodius, if you care). I’d already used JSDoc heavily throughout the

Reading Time: 5 minutes Thanks to a solid 55 years or so of film and TV telling us that the AIs we create will try to kill us, and then watching ChatGPT and operator-attacking-murder-AIs emerge in roughly the same 6 month time frame , I feel absolutely confident in saying that humans are terrible listeners. But I think, also,

Reading Time: 6 minutes Have you ever sat down to write a bit of JavaScript thinking, “this is easy; shouldn’t take more than a few minutes,” and then six hours later there you are with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a sharpened stick in the other shouting curses in Latin at StackOverflow answers? Obviously that’s a

Reading Time: 8 minutes The JavaScript array. A simple, elegant data structure. Easy to make them. Easy to add data to them. Easy to sort them. Easy to iterate on them. What could possibly be weird about JavaScript arrays?

Reading Time: 3 minutes A complaint I hear sometimes from folks programmers learning JavaScript is that it has both null and undefined. If JavaScript is your first programming language, this may not seem weird, but once you compare it to others… yeah, it’s strange. I have some suspicions for why this is and they may not be right but