I can’t believe I have to say any of this stuff. I shouldn’t have to. Nobody should have to say any of this. But I want to be on record. I want the world to know where I stand. When I first started writing this, there were two points I wanted to make. The first was […]
Author Archives: Kagan MacTane
Why Did My Layout Just Go All Wonky?
Friday, November 20th, 2015 – 9:51 am
If you add Boostrap’s CSS to a layout that’s already working just fine, you may find that things shift in strange, subtle ways. And even not-so-subtle ones, like basically your entire layout breaking. Generally, this seems to manifest as block-level elements becoming too small, and clipping out content inside their bounding boxes. A div that used […]
Thoughts On “The Rating Game”
Thursday, November 5th, 2015 – 7:35 am
I started reading The Verge’s recent article, “The Rating Game” (subtitled “How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses”), and quickly started thinking, “Wow, I have to tweet about this. Including some comments I have.” By the time I was halfway through, I’d come up with so many comments, they’d have required a huge […]
What’s Wrong With the “Minimal Weighings” Puzzle for Front-End Interviews
Thursday, October 29th, 2015 – 6:24 pm
A while back, I came across a post by Philip Walton, who points out that most front-end interview questions aren’t well suited for their basic task of… well, testing a candidate’s front-end development knowledge. At least, the sorts of things he ran into were mostly “logical puzzles, generic coding challenges, and algorithm design problems”, as […]
Microsoft Continues Their War Against Uptime
Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 – 8:37 pm
One of the things we’ve heard about Windows 10 is that it’s “the last windows version”, and from here on out, there’ll just be patches, incremental updates, and maybe the occasional service pack. So, in some ways, it’s sort of like Chrome’s habit of silently upgrading itself with no muss and no fuss. Except for one problem: Microsoft […]
Book Review: The Martian, by Andy Weir
Saturday, September 26th, 2015 – 1:28 pm
In something of a departure from my previous themes of web/software development and political/cultural issues in tech, I’m doing a book review. Given that it’s The Martian, it is something that that’s likely of interest to geeks… but as time goes on, I may branch out even more. What I’m saying is, this coyote’s tracks are […]
Skipping Regexes in ES6 is Nothing Compared to Skipping Boolean-Comparison Warts
Saturday, September 19th, 2015 – 3:10 pm
Yesterday, Wes Bos tweeted about ES6’s startsWith(), endsWith(), and includes() methods. He said it was “[t]hree less JavaScript Regexes you’ll have to write”. Which is true, but I feel it misses the point. I mean, the regexes for initial match and final match are really not that hard, and the regex for plain inclusion is, well, […]
I Feel Like Part of the Problem
Sunday, July 12th, 2015 – 8:00 pm
In San Francisco now, I no longer feel like a useful, contributing member of The City’s social or cultural scene. Merely by virtue of being “a developer”, I feel like I’ve become Part Of the Problem. I sure as hell try not to be. I try to encourage the arts; I try to defend and promote […]
Year-End Self-Grading
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014 – 8:44 pm
The past couple of years, I’ve posted a couple of year-end retrospective posts, analyzing how much I’d posted, and how much of it had to do with gender issues. Time for this year’s round-up! (A few days late.) This year (well, last year), I managed only 12 posts total. Which sucks. Of those, two were tagged […]
The Opposite of Spam
Sunday, December 15th, 2013 – 2:53 pm
I got the most astonishing email the other day. I can only describe it as the opposite of spam, in two different ways. I’ll get to just what the ways were in a minute. First, the back-story. It seems it must be a year since I bought John Resig’s Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. (I […]