Originally written in 2017, Updated for 2021. Austin continues to land in the “Best Of” news for continued growth. The population growth rate still stands at roughly 120 people per day (157 gross, ~35 people leave each day too). …

As predicted last year, a trend is emerging around the creation of custom JavaScript runtimes. At first, it was just browsers. Then there was Narwahl. Then there was Node.js and lesser known runtimes like Vert.x. Today, the world has Cloudflare Workers, Deno, and now Bun.sh. Bun is a new JavaScript…

A.I.-driven development is starting to emerge with tools like GitHub’s Copilot and Google’s DeepMind AlphaCode. These tools produce functioning programming code, causing many developers to question whether their jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence. Will developers be replaced by artificial intelligence? No. A.I. …

Open Source software plays a critical role in organizations of all sizes. When open source fails, the natural response is to question why the failure occurred and how to prevent the problem from happening again. Increasingly, failures stem from lack of support and/or misalignment of interests. Unfortunately, this is a…

Big tech is listening to developer noise in their quest to be best. Unfortunately, this is starting to deteriorate the integrity of some programming languages. To better understand this, consider the recent Chrome release, with a small but important change in their DevTools. Developers can redeclare a JavaScript const variable…

If you’re a JavaScript developer, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Don’t pollute the global namespace.” This rule of thumb has saved developers many hours, and still has some merit. However, advancements in JavaScript have given way to new opportunities for using the “global” space in a safer manner. Original Thinking JavaScript developers…

Using the assign method, loops, and the spread operator — Objects are a powerful part of JavaScript. They are the inspiration for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). As a fundamental component of application development, there are many ways to work with them. This short guide offers insights into JavaScript objects and how to combine them using plain JavaScript. None of the…

This question was originally asked on Quora. The original response was sent to over two million Quora users. This article expands upon the answer. Google trends suggests “javascript” interest is in decline. One glimpse at a downward trending chart from the world’s most popular search engine could easily make one…

Software is a living ecosystem. It’s composed of code libraries, logic, data streams, and other detailed components that work together. Documentation is supposed to be a “guide” for navigating this technical ecosystem. However; truly useful documentation is still difficult to produce and consume. Documentation’s intrinsic value is dependent on the…