Jake Worth

After version v12.17.0, Node’s REPL provides a useful preview effect.

With my Node versions managed via NVM, I want to be on the latest LTS.

How do I “get up to speed” in a new codebase?

Approach caching with caution.

The Law of Demeter is important in object-oriented programming.

Today I learned how to fill in an emoji with CSS.

What I call “wraparound” are repeatable indices on an array.

Here’s a periodic reminder that JavaScript supports string concatenation with a plus sign: > 'foo' + 'bar' 'foobar'

Need an array of letters?

When you join an array in JavaScript, the default separator is a comma: node> ['j', 'a', 'k', 'e'].join() 'j,a,k,e'

The JavaScript bitwise AND operator (&) can be used for some real-world tasks, like testing if a number is odd or even.

I think many engineers would be better contributors if they started to think more about the customer impact of their work.

Longtime Vim users know the vimtutor program, which teaches you Vim in Vim.

After reviewing a lot of pull requests, I’ve settled on a simple default: if my comments are all nitpicks, suggestions, questions, or non-blocking issues, I leave them and approve the PR at the same time.

When possible, I prefer to upgrade dependencies incrementally rather than making several version jumps.

A policy I favor with dependency management: go forward.

If people can make catastrophic mistakes on your team, the process is broken.

Why do software teams push continuous deployment so strongly?

Is a Docker container available on a registry?

Permanently forking a library is something I’ve observed on several teams.

A missing README is rarely just missing documentation.

When adding CI checks, you can gradually increase rigor while easing your codebase into a better place.

I use the append >> and overwrite > redirection operators all the time.

A developer experience practice I’ve recently picked up is routine Friday reboots of my workstation.

I’ve been participating in fully-remote software standups every day for over a decade, and over the past two years, leading them, too.

One of my favorite Git tricks is shoveling changes to a Git diff and then applying them later.

Do you want to read more?

Docker gives you a way to control startup, while codifying that one container depends on others.

Need to override some Docker configuration locally?

I recently re-read It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier of Basecamp.

Vim-tiny is a great choice for remote server work.

Most JavaScript projects come with a package.json.

One of my favorite engineering questions is: “What’s wrong with this idea?”

“The server is 200 GiBs.”

I recently dug into the wonderful world of MySQL binlogs!

When you see a list of numbers in a log or stack overflow, it’s often ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)!

I’ve got a command docker on my machine.

What is a programmer but a series of PRs (pull requests)?

You might have heard that using blocking, waiting code, e.g., sleep in many languages, is discouraged.

Abstractions in code are easy to add and challenging to remove.

How can I output the entire DOM to a file in a JavaScript test?

Git has two kinds of commands: “porcelain” and “plumbing”.

This year I built several Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to support ongoing R&D.

If I had to start over as a person who wanted to become a professional programmer, in 2026, what would I do?

Here’s a list of the things that I’d like to learn about and have chosen not to specialize in (yet), as of 2026.

Today I accidentally I found a calculator on my computer, bc.

There’s an enviable quality of great engineers I’ve known: they seem to get things right the first time.

I’ve been hacking on a TypeScript file all day, but I need transpiled JavaScript for any testing.

In MCP server code using stdio, you can’t use any functions that print to stdout.

Watch and re-transpile any TypeScript file with: tsc file.ts --watch