It's 2024, y'all. We're 20 days into the year, so I'm running out of time to write that end of year post I always do. I haven't quite known what to write, but here goes. Career One big thing I realized is that 2024 marks ten years (!) that I've been a developer, which is my second career. In 2014, I interned during the day for a bartender I knew who had a WordPress shop, and worked at night at NAMCO's Pac-Man restaurant (yes, somehow that was a thing. Billy Mitchell even showed up). By the first half of 2015, I found my first job as a junior web developer for Lettuce Entertain You, a Chicago r ..read more

Happy New Year, friends! Time to write another year in review. This will be the seventh time I've done this. Here are all the previous ones: 2016 into 2017 2017 into 2018 2018 into 2019 2019 into 2020 2020 into 2021 2021 into 2022 I have really high hopes for 2023! It's only a few days in and so far so good. I've really had a chance to relax, rest, and reset. Here's me and Dimo at the end of 2022. Here are a few bits of content out in the ether that I enjoyed this year. The Bear (TV Show) - If you want to know what my life was like before changing careers into development, this show does t ..read more

Recently, after I watched the latest movie in the Avatar series - yes, the one with the blue people - it got me thinking about why I like the series so much, and I realized it's not the only "blue alien falls in love with human ultimately resulting in inter-species transmogrification" story that I love. That got me thinking about Animorphs. Actually, I never stopped thinking about Animorphs. Despite the fact that I read through the series when I was in grade school, and despite the fact that it was written for children, the dark themes and situations, cast of complex characters, and moral quan ..read more

I'm just going to write some memories of Josh. The mundane, everyday things. The stuff I'll slowly, inevitably forget, because I'm not sure what else to write but I want to at least have a place where I can remember a bit. And maybe a place to share a bit, so others can know what I knew and it lasts a little longer. Josh would almost always win every game. And it didn't matter if it was a strategy game, board game, Chess, Mario Kart, or anything else - he would win, and everyone knew he would win, and everyone would gang up against him, and he'd still win. Here he is beating me at Chess. I w ..read more

Once again, I've redesigned my website. Every now and then I get bored of the way it looks, or I notice a lot of people cloning it and feel like I have to make something more unique again. The last time I changed it was September of last year, so I almost made it a full year without a complete redesign. Of course, if you look at the version I blogged about in the last redesign post vs. the one I had right before updating, you'll see it changed a lot. I tend to never be completely satisfied and tweak it a lot. It's always my hope that I can tweak less and write more! But this is my procrastinat ..read more

This article was originally written for DigitalOcean. Introduction In An Introduction to GraphQL, you learned that GraphQL is an open-source query language and runtime for APIs created to solve issues that are often experienced with traditional REST API systems. A good way to begin understanding how all the pieces of GraphQL fit together is to make a GraphQL API server. Although Apollo GraphQL is a popular commercial GraphQL implementation favored by many large companies, it is not a prerequisite for making your own GraphQL API server. In this tutorial, you will make an Express API server in N ..read more

Despite the fact that I've been consistently writing on here for six years now, I've said very little about myself. The writing has been mostly dry, and very technical. A lot of that has to do with the way the site is laid out - for example, after writing a several thousand word diatribe about Redux or the event loop, it always seemed strange to follow it up the next day with some casual little blog post about what's going on in my life, or something serious or personal. I also wanted people to see the posts I've worked hard on and didn't want them to get drowned out by unrelated posts. I've t ..read more

It's been a while since I've written anything due to some personal concerns that I might write about later, but don't worry, I'm still around and I'm still coding. Recently, I went to Texas and bought a three-row diatonic button accordion. Diatonic accordions are popular for a lot of different types of folk music, which is generally learned by ear. This is good for me, because I don't really know how to read music anyway. The accordion has 34 buttons on the treble side and 12 buttons on the bass side. Unlike a piano accordion, which has the same logical, chromatic layout as a piano, the diaton ..read more

View the Source or Demo for the schema-based form system described in this article. Working with forms on the front end is tedious and repetitive. If you don't have a good system set up, it can involve a lot of copy and pasting. If you have a bad abstraction, it can be much worse. I've worked with some nightmare systems that were significantly worse than just manually writing all the form logic, error handling, validation, dirty state, etc. But nonetheless, taking care of all that can really start to add up and take a lot of time. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do something like this: defin ..read more

Wow, here we are, the sixth installment in the New Year series of posts. This year feels almost like a lost weekend. Aside from a few small cabin and camping trips throughout the year, I hardly left my city or even my home. I spent much of the time relaxing, reading books, being with friends and family, playing games, and I even made a few paintings. It's been good to focus on myself and not feel guilty about not writing enough or creating enough. It's hard to believe it, but I've been working as a developer and creating all my side projects for nearly eight years now. I've experienced major ..read more