ef4's Dev Blog

"Mens et Manus" (latin for "Mind and Hand") is the official motto of MIT [https://web.mit.edu]. Lots of schools have Latin mottoes, and they are usually pretty bland. But mens et manus was — and still is — a radical social statement. It says that knowing

There is a strain of thought in the web development community that believes there's a tension between having comprehensive developer tools and delivering good user experiences: This is exactly backwards. At the scale of the entire web, better tools are the only way to deliver better experiences. The

The most reliable way to evaluate programmer candidates is to hire them to do a bit of realistic work. This is widely understood, but not widely practiced. The biggest barrier is finding projects for them to work on. In most organizations, the overhead of getting a new person started is

The amount of complexity a single human programmer can handle is fundamentally limited. Until our brave cyborg future comes, even the best programmers can only hold so much in their minds at once. And the number of programmers that can productively work on a single project is limited by the

There are two very different kinds of simplicity in software engineering: simple interfaces and simple implementations. Simple interfaces are absolutely critical, because the budget for interface complexity is paid out of your head. But simple implementations are far less important. The budget for implementation complexity is paid out of an

An inflammatory anti-Rails post [http://solnic.eu/2016/05/22/my-time-with-rails-is-up.html] has been getting lots of discussion lately. The author's frustrations are legitimate, but his articulation of the problem takes an absurd turn: > The really challenging part in this discussion

Drupal [https://www.drupal.org] project lead Dries Buytaert recently launched a community discussion by asking "should we decouple Drupal with a client-side framework? [http://buytaert.net/should-we-decouple-drupal-with-a-client-side-framework]". My high-level takeaway from the discussion is that the Drupal

Much of the discussion around frameworks -- particularly in the Javascript community -- is mired in misunderstanding over a key question: who are frameworks really for? Beginner Beginning web developers tend to lean heavily on frameworks. This is a good thing — it lets them stand on the shoulders of giants and start