Notes

Quick thoughts, observations, and links. For more formal writing see Blog.


“KillsParentOnException” a lesson in API naming

An internal Meta decorator name which taught me something important about API naming


From opera to tech

Reflections on my journey from a classical music background to a career in big tech


Videos: I used to sing with a men’s chorus

Youtube videos of a choral group I used to sing with


My GraphQL Conf 2024 talk: Semantic Nullability

Youtube video of the talk I gave at GraphQL Conf 2024 covering advanced client error handling and its implications for potentially fundamentally solving the problem of pervasive nullability in GraphQL


A video of my wife and I singing Mozart’s Requiem

A video from earlier this year of my wife Chelsea Hollow and myself singing the soprano and bass solos in Mozart’s Requiem


I was on the Changelog podcast again

I caught up with Jerod and Adam about nostalgia, music, file sharing, Napster and the weird stuff I found in corrupt Winamp skins


How the React model tames N by N code complexity

Explaining how exactly the UI = f(state) model tames code complexity


Hal fixing a light bulb (what software development always feels like to me)

This clip from Malcolm in the Middle perfectly encapsulates the experience of trying to get anything done with software


Itsy Bitsy Data Structures

Sharing this repository which teaches data structures through charmingly commented JavaScript implementations


Bob Nystrom explains the Pratt Parser algorithm

Sharing Bob Nystrom’s excellent blog post explaining the Pratt Parser algorithm which offers a very clean way to model operator precedence


Windows93.net

One of the most fascinating pieces of software art/trolling/humor I’ve ever seen


Using Notion as my CMS with Next.js

Why I chose to use Notion as the backing CMS for the Notes portion of this site, and the technical details of how it’s implemented


The Winamp Skin Museum has a secret debug mode

Shhhh. Don't tell anyone, but the Winamp Skin Museum has a secret debug mode.


The Winamp Skin Museum is powered by an sqlite3 database

The Winamp Skin Museum is powered by an sqlite3 database containing 1.2gb of metadata about 86,000 Winamp skins and exposed as a public GraphQL endpoint


The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins

I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes


How I indirectly helped remove stray characters from across the web

I wrote a simple lint rule which detected hundreds of user facing bugs at Meta and inspired my colleague to ship a similar validation to every major JS parser


Next.js’s unstable_cache() demystified

I found some interesting information about Next.js’ elusive unstable_cache API


“Alexa, add half & half”

The funniest Alexa interaction I’ve ever had


Book: Crafting Interpreters

A glowing review of the book I most recommend to people interested in learning about compilers


A nice way to render Markdown in React apps

A pattern for rendering Markdown in React apps directly from an AST without any serialized HTML


Avoid “straw that broke the camels back” lint rules

A class of lint rules that I think are best to avoid


The Challenges with Client Controlled Nullability

Explaining some of the non-obvious problems with the Client Controlled Nullability GraphQL spec RFC


Avoid name-spacing GraphQL mutation fields

Explaining why nesting your mutations inside GraphQL types is problematic


How Relay Enables Optimal Data Fetching

Sharing a blog post I wrote about what makes Relay so special


On software becoming a prestige job

Reflecting on how the reasons people pursue software engineering has evolved


On grinding

Thoughts on the tradeoff of not grinding


Elf Storage

Probably the funniest vandalism I’ve ever seen


Seeing Beyond Edge Cases

How my thinking about edge cases has evolved as I’ve grown as a software engineer


Beyond PEP 8 by Raymond Hettinger

An amazing talk articulating how code style can make you miss the forest for the tree


Diagnostics are the UX of a compiler

Sharing an insightful observation about the role diagnostics play in compiler design


Software at Scale

On scaling software to large numbers of developers, not just large amounts of data


Life, a fatal STD

A humorous quip by my high school sociology teacher


On persuasive technical writing and clarity of thought

How technical writing forces clearer thinking


Becoming a local subject matter expert

Expertise is a self fulfilling prophecy


Type systems as a mental tool

Type systems lead to clearer thinking and thus better code


Eager vs Lazy Learning

An observation about the way I learn


Web Audio regression in Safari iOS 17 Beta

Documenting a regression, I observed in iOS’ implementation of the web audio API


On ephemeral UI, fragile app state, and anxiety

Ephemeral UI make us nervous because we’ve learned that there’s a high likelihood lose our state by accident


Some statistics are just a function of term definitions

A class of statistics to look out for when evaluating statistical claims


A Winamp Skin Detective Story

Tracking down the cause of some mysteriously corrupted Winamp skins


“Cool S” as a Unicode standard

There was once a proposal to codify the ”cool s” as a unicode character


An old engineer’s tale

My dad‘s reframing of a sexist idiom


JSFuck: Express any JavaScript program with just six characters

Express any JavaScript code with just these six characters


Why UrlMe.me failed

Reflections on why my side project meme generator never caught on


Extracting a beloved Pokémon from a corrupted save game

Sharing a YouTube video of an awesome ROM hacking rescue mission


Chord notation is a domain-specific language

Reflecting on parallels between chord notation and software language design


Sentimental Versioning

Sharing a great post about software projects with unique versioning schemes


Disassembling Winamp with Ghidra to find the Maki interpreter

Sharing my n00b attempt at disassembling the Winamp binary


My favorite API: Vim Mode

An observation that Vim mode is a type of API


A GraphQL Maturity Model

I believe the benefits of GraphQL are fundamentally under-realized. Most organizations fail to capture much of the value it can provide.


How to build a typeahead

Sharing the canonical post on how to properly build a typeahead. It’s much more complicated than it first appears


Compiling to AST

A pattern for tracking location information when compiling to a high level language


Lint or Keep Quiet

Code review feedback that could be encoded as a lint rule, should be



My friends and I meet Thomas Hampson

My one interaction with the famous baritone Thomas Hampson


Tom Waits on small print

A great Tom Waits quip on the nature of “small print”


Tom Lehrer on Mozart

Tom Lehrer quote on comparing your successes to those of others


A verbose version of The Night Before Christmas

Sharing a humorous rewrite of a classic poem that would often get pulled out around Christmas time during my childhood






Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond

Great way to conceptualize very small increments of time


Creating project-specific ESLint rules in a Yarn workspace

How to create custom project-specific lint rules for a repository that is using Yarn Workspaces where ESLint is run from the workspace root


Wireless Xbox controllers work with Macs

TIL Xbox controllers “just work” with Macs, and you have a lovely nostalgic evening playing Mario 64 in an emulator


Super Tiny Type Checker

A minimal JS implementation of a type checker great for hands on learners


Jones Forth

A prodigiously commented implementation of the Forth programming language in x86 assembly. So clearly communicated even I could mostly follow it


BBC micro:bit

A beautiful, inexpensive single board computer for teaching kids to program


Sudoku Set Equivalence Theory: The Phistomefel Ring

An incredible property that all sudoku puzzles have which can be proven with set theory


Why there was never a Winamp 4

Did you ever wonder why they skipped straight from Winamp 3 to Winamp 5?









Redbean







Laravel’s obsessive comment style

An insane detail that points to the obsessive approach Taylor Otwell took with Laravel



Falsehoods programmers believe about music genres

Did you know that the ID3 metadata tagging system hard coded the entire set of music genres? Some of the ones that got included are hilarious.



















Build your own LEGO fidget cube

A simple but captivating fidget toy you can build out of LEGO