I’ve written enough articles about JavaScript to have had plenty of people tell me I should just use Next.js instead of learning how to do things myself. I finally had some time to dive in to Next.js …

Originally published at https://devtails.xyz. Edit January 4, 2023 As expected, there’s been a lot of focus on the specific example presented. While some of these criticisms are valid, the point of the article is not the specific behaviour demonstrated. Instead it’s about demonstrating the expense of a single React render…

Originally published at https://devtails.xyz. You can see the current progress and even read this article using the engram browser from your browser. That’s right, this browser has been compiled with emscripten to wasm so you can run a browser in a browser. This post is the first post in likely…

Originally published at https://devtails.xyz. Intro I’ve started building a web browser and initially set it up with a relatively hacky regex to “parse” the HTML. This had no regard for nested structures and very likely had all kinds of other issues. The google search results for “build html parser in c++”…

Originally published at https://devtails.xyz. I have been using MongoDB since about 2015. I have enjoyed the flexibility of not defining schemas and constantly running migrations. Particularly when it comes to prototyping and experimenting. As part of my project, https://github.com/engramhq/engram, I am re-learning, exploring, and sharing how different parts of web…

Originally published at https://devtails.xyz. All of my technical writing is originally written for https://devtails.xyz/. dev/tails is a blog hosted from Github Pages and built using the jekyll static site generator. Up until now, I’ve relied on Medium’s “Import a Story” feature to cross post to Medium. Unfortunately, almost 100% of…

Originally published at https://devtails.xyz on October 10, 2022. See source code on Github This post describes how to write and run jasmine tests in node when using TypeScript. The general approach used here is to compile all TypeScript files to a build folder and then run jasmine out of the…

Residence Advising When I was a Residence Advisor back at UBC, I received all kinds of coaching and advice about how to become a better leader. …