IMPORTANT UPDATE! READ THIS FIRST! Hello reader from the future! So here’s the thing. I wrote this review in 2021 when I was evaluating various visual programming tools to help me create a micro-SaaS website. Turns out that I had absolutely no clue what I was talking about, especially when it comes to Builder.

Last week, I got back from RAPID + TCT, the 3D printing industry’s biggest annual conference in North America, and I saw the field’s future: Big industrial machines printing incredibly complex materials that can’t be manufactured with traditional methods (e.g., lattices, metamaterials) Big industrial machines printing lots of stuff at…

tl;dr: If you’re a web dev and you’ve heard about this newfangled ReScript/Reason/ReasonML/BuckleScript thingy, you’re most likely looking for ReScript, which is a new language that combines the best parts of JS and OCaml. It has a compiler that compiles to JS and leverages OCaml’s static and sound type system…

Here’s what you should know — Hi! 👋 Thank you for taking the time to reach out to me. If I’ve sent you this link, it means that I want to talk further about potentially working together but I want you to know more about me and what I’m looking for before we invest our time…

Package management as functional programming — I’ve been updating my workflow based on lessons learned from my first GIS project. One of the major developer UX problems I faced was installing and managing a GIS toolchain on my laptop based on QGIS and GDAL. …

The humility of really committing to your career — I’ve been writing code professionally for about six years now. I’ve had at least one job title with the word “senior” in it, though as a programmer, I consider myself a journeyman. I’ve maintained a narrative during my short career that, for me, programming is just a means to an…

It’s about pricing and scaling, not architecture — Not sure whether TJ Holowaychuk was the first to point this out or not, but this tweet triggered an epiphany for me about serverless: There’s nothing that demands that you write your AWS Lambda functions as tiny one-off components that are composed into a cloud of synchronized microservices. A…

The alternative is much scarier — Mark Zuckerberg stated during his recent Congressional testimony that “there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.” Would a paid, ad-free option would help encourage a more privacy-focused ecosystem? Common wisdom says yes, but perhaps the alternative is much scarier. For all the privacy problems that exist…

but do buy into the cryptocurrency future. Blockchains are a brilliant application of cryptography to the concept of a distributed, immutable log. But here’s the thing: there is a 99% chance that blockchains are totally inappropriate for whatever problem you’re thinking about solving, especially when the disadvantages are so numerous. When should you use a blockchain? Almost never. …