Jake Worth

I have a cron job that opens a program every day at a certain time.

My friend Josh recently wrote about a common mistake using pbcopy, Apple’s pasteboard utility.

I recently learned a practice for customer communication that I’d like to document.

Anytime Chrome loads a webpage, you can pause script execution without a debugger.

One common trait among early-career programmers is seeing technology choices in black-and-white.

My definition of “I don’t understand” debugging.

I’ve been organizing Meetups for a decade, starting with Vim Chicago and Chicago Elixir, and now running Maine JS from Portland, Maine.

Here’s my annual review covering 2024.

This post is about how to write software well.

TONY: We should take this outside.

I was the third engineer hired by my company, not counting our technical co-founder.

Today I’d like to talk about a quality that’s essential to success as a computer programmer.

Often, when you work as an engineer on a small team, you don’t have dedicated designers on staff.

Our industry has a concept of “10x engineers”, individual contributors who have the impact of ten colleagues.

If you’re creating a hyperlink with query params, and those param values can have plus signs, it’s important to encode them values.

Sometimes in TypeScript we’d like to say a function can either have one typed prop, or the other, never both and never neither.

Exploring your JS dependencies locally is a great way to learn and experiment.

I’m reading Functional-Light JavaScript by Kyle Simpson, and learning a lot!

If you’ve ever watched me debug, you might think I’m moving slowly.

Reviewing code is tricky.

Today I solved a mystery: a file was being Git-ignored in a new project that didn’t have a .gitignore.

I’m using a JavaScript text editor library and when it fails to load, there is no form field on the page at all.

Complex HTML forms often end up with multiple submit buttons.

In Zsh, if you type man cd, instead of a manual page, you’ll get this: See the built-in command description in the appropriate shell manual page.

autofocus is a global attribute that sets a field as focused on page load.

When using radio, you might experience a strange phenomenon: the radio clock refuses to stay correctly set.

When doing web programming in a context where scroll might be expected, you may see some surprising behavior in the scrollable HTML– an inexplicable gray bar on the bottom or right of the element.

Today I had a situation where I wanted a child component to re-render on command.

Be careful when making a network request like this to a Rails controller with strong parameters: // const employee = { name: "Jake" }; const updateEmployee = (id: number, employee: Employee) => axios.put<Employee>(`/employees/${id}`, employee) def empl…

When testing a serialized Rails API with RSpec, a common mistake is to assert about the response body, only to find that it’s an empty string.

Passing props conditionally a component makes sense in many situations.

Want to connect a list of React components with a delimiter, like a comma?

Suppose you want to append to a file that’s write-protected and can only be edited via sudo.

Anytime you add a header to a markdown file, GitHub attaches an href with its downcased name.

Reviewing a GitHub PR on that contains a lot of whitespace changes?

The Chrome DevTools Network Tab is incredibly useful for frontend web development, but it can be noisy.

I recently calculated that I merge 0.8 pull requests every day into my team repo.

⌘ + R.

I’ve been a practitioner of Shawn Wang’s ‘Learn in Public’ for years.

I recently hit a decade of professional programming.

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2023.

React Router’s Link component isn’t just for internal links; it can work like an anchor tag, too, sending users outside the application.

When you combine cat (concatenate) with > (output redirection), you can create and write to a file from the command line. $ cat > test.txt Hit enter after the file name, and your terminal will wait for input.

With the new as const construct, we can derive a TypeScript union type from a JavaScript array!

When I was learning to program, I was fortunate to pair with very experienced engineers.

Open Chrome DevTools, and click the three dots in the top right corner.