Notable Articles
If you’re here because you want to see stuff I’ve written, rather than random stuff I found on the web, then you’ll probably find this list helpful. Below, grouped by topic, are some articles on this site that might be interesting to you.
- You can read about our birdcam. It’s a poor‐man’s Dropcam. Watches for movement, captures video, uploads it to a Dropbox folder.
- For some stupid reason, I wrote an eleven‐part series on the arcade cabinet I built. Runs RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 3.
- I wrote a four‐part series on the “laundry spy” whose purpose is to use vibration to infer when my washer or dryer is on, then notify me by phone when a cycle is done.
- At some point I hope to write about the Pi that’s serving as a home automation server.
I have opinions about JavaScript. Here are some things I’ve written about JS in general and Prototype in particular:
- A long time ago I wrote about why you shouldn’t use
for...inon arrays. This used to be controversial. - Capabilities vs. Quirks — or why it’s OK to do ugly things to check for the existence of ugly browser bugs.
- Undecidability of equivalence, or why two different functions will never equal one another, even if they have the exact same contents.
- Deep‐extending objects in JavaScript — a bad idea in the general case, but it comes in handy if you want to implement the “configurable” pattern.
- PDoc, Prototype’s inline documentation parser. PDoc generates Prototype’s API documentation as well as the manual for scripty2.
- An article about Filibusted, a site I built to keep track of which U.S. Senators were the most reliable filibusterers. Won an award from Sunlight Labs.
- Hypermedia APIs: Part One and Part Two. Exploring some API design decisions we made at Gowalla.
I don’t have any formal design training, but lack of expertise has never stopped me from having opinions.
- I wrote about pagination controls and how they quite often aren’t very good.
- I redesigned a notice that I found inside my 2010 Census packet.