Teejay VanSlyke

Elm is "a delightful language for reliable webapps

Yesterday I found out my biggest client will no longer need my services in a couple months.

In modern life we're caught in a vicious circle.

A few months ago, my partner introduced me to the Day Designer.

For the past two years I've been devoted to the pursuit of less and fewer: Less debt.

I'm fascinated by the subtle changes that make a big difference.

I won't respond to emails immediately But I will respond to them within 48 hours, and when I do I'll make sure I give them the time they deserve.

One of my friends asked a great question about weekly billing as a freelancer: How do you position weekly billing with an organization that has strict accounting procedures?

I've had a fire under my ass the past couple months.

I've spent a decade honing my engineering and design workflows, but never really bothered to share all the tools that make my days more productive and enjoyable.

It's my ten-year anniversary of working remotely.

Where did all my hair go?!

A thought occurred to me today as I was knee-deep in a Material UI codebase: For a lot of MVP's, hiring a visual designer is largely irrelevant now.

You could say I've been throwing tons of crap at the wall lately.

Too often we expect instant results.

I was at a local tech meetup.

Since moving to Eugene, Oregon at the beginning of 2017, I've been flat-out astonished at the energy booming in the tech and creative communities here.

Incoming Webhooks are the simplest way to post messages from your application into your users' Slack channels.

You're using a static site generator like Middleman or Jekyll.

If you're like most freelance developers, you bill by the hour.

I ran into a strange issue today when writing some assertions using the Enzyme testing library for React.

Vim is my favorite text editor.

We've all been there: You're about to build another front-end feature.

The past couple days I've been struggling to patch an issue in a client's codebase wherein PostgreSQL is reporting the following repeatedly in my error tracker: pq: sorry, too many clients already pq: remaining connection slots are reserved for non-repl…

var gulp = require('gulp'); var imageResize = require('gulp-image-resize'); var paths = { images: "source/images/**/*" } gulp.task('images', function() { gulp.src(['source/images/**/*.png', 'source/images/**/*.jpg']) .pipe(imageResize({

If you're building a database-backed Golang application using PostgreSQL, you might come across one or both of the following errors: pq: sorry, too many clients already pq: remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections

A couple months ago, I had a sharp, shooting pain in my left hand.

If you're a Rubyist, you probably use the likes of rspec, cucumber, rake, and other commands frequently.

When setting the state on a React component within an event handler, you'll find that the state isn't updated if you dump the state to the console immediately after: The React documentation warns: setState() does not immediately mutate this.state but crea…

If you're like me, you've struggled to come up with a reasonable scheme for naming things in JavaScript.

When creating React components using ES6 class notation, you'll need to bind event handlers passed as props to this, or you'll find that the handlers will be bound instead to the DOM element.

I went to update a Middleman project's gems today.

Every so often, I'm forced to shut down my Mac by holding down the power button.

I'm turning 31 in less than two weeks.

If you're about to hire a contractor to remodel your kitchen, you won't ask them if they're really good at hammering nails.

Disclaimer: The following is my personal account of stopping drinking.

Do you have enough saved for retirement for your age?

Unless you're living under a rock, you've probably heard of or used Slack, the now wildly popular workplace chat application that's slowly killing IRC.

Tuesday morning.

Backbone's Model implementation is great for most things, but one thing I've had a hard time with is waiting for multiple models to save before proceeding.

Instagram uses OAuth to authenticate, meaning it can be kind of a drag to use its API if you don't want to build a web application.

Building software is about programming, right?

Photo is of Destiny USA, a shopping mall in Syracuse, New York formerly known as Carousel Center.

My relationship with marijuana began like most teenagers.

In my ten or so years of dating, I've experienced triumphs, failures, heartbreaks, butterflies, and everything in between.

I've worked in the startup scene for the better part of a decade.

Despite my relatively stable income, maintaining a healthy, consistent savings rate has always been a difficult test of my will.

For those of you who missed it, last week I gave a talk at Ignite Portland about my experiences living in an RV in Portland (fast-forward to around 15:00): And, if you'd like to download the slide deck for your own amusement, click the link below.

By Tynan's recommendation, I downloaded Sebastian Marshall's ebook Ikigai.

I've just put the finishing touches on Minify, my short ebook about my transition to living in a tiny RV, and am happy to announce that it's now available for free download.