My first experience with Deno

I remember first learning about NodeJS during a presentation given by Ryan Dahl at SenchaCon in 2010 -- it was unbelievable to me then that someone could take JavaScript and run it as a CLI, power a web server, or do any of the things that I now take ... more

Should JS Frameworks prevent XSS?

The short answer is: Yes. Absolutely. You might think that in 2018 every JavaScript developer actively thought about this question. Cyber security is in the news every single day, and for years groups like OWASP have been preaching for XSS attacks to ... more

Migrating from Karma to Jest

For the past several years my team has been running our JavaScript unit tests through Karma. Things worked mostly “just fine”, but recently our continuous integration server (TeamCity) started complaining about memory issues: FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST ... more

Creating PDF files with JavaScript

A long time ago I was tasked with creating a PDF file in my web application — basically just dump part of the screen into a PDF file and prompt the user to download it. Easy, right? At the time I did some research and it seems like the only “reliable” ... more

Cybersecurity: Freeze your credit

A few weeks ago after the major Equifax hack was revealed, John Resig (of jQuery fame) posted on his Facebook page some advice on how to freeze your credit report. Because I have been doing quite a bit of public speaking on the topic, I needed an easier ... more

Using MobX with React

I recently volunteered to speak about MobX at the Chicago React Meetup, and I decided to write this post to help organize my own thoughts as well as promote its content to a greater React/JavaScript audience. MobX has been an incredible cornerstone for ... more

Copy to Clipboard in JavaScript

Relatively recently Chrome (v43) added support for the cut and copy commands. Web developers around the world rejoiced in that we could all now natively support the pesky feature “copy to clipboard” in JavaScript. While I’ve made use of this feature a ... more

Introducing JavaScript Courses and Mentoring

When I first started aKa Web Design as my freelance consulting business years ago, I was initially focused on building websites for local small businesses. Over time my focus shifted towards building web and mobile applications (primarily using JavaScript) ... more

Detecting Motion and Facial Recognition with JavaScript

For years now I’ve been favoriting some cool tech demos involving HTML5, canvas, and JavaScript I find on Twitter. I’m not really sure what I ever plan to do with them — but they’re cool enough that I didn’t want to lose sight of them. HTML5 Security ... more

Thoughts on the npm fiasco

If you haven’t already heard, there was big news in the world of JavaScript this week: someone unpublished a small npm package and broke the internet. Although that statement is clearly a gross over-simplification (and exaggeration), the event has raised ... more

JavaScript: Choices

As a follow-up to my previous post, I wanted to point out something else interesting in the whole npm/Kik/left-pad debacle: that all JavaScript developers have choices when it comes to building applications, and those choices always have consequences. ... more

Making the Tech World a Better Place

Most people who know me professionally are aware that I’m pretty active in the local (Chicago/Milwaukee) JavaScript scene. I speak at conferences and meetups a handful of times a year, I support various events (either in person or through social media) ... more

2016: New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time of year again… time to reflect on my past New Year’s Resolutions and establish some new ones for the coming year! Looking back at 2015 Last year I had several goals: Professional goals: Broaden my JavaScript skill set. Focus on some back-end ... more

Node.js Addons – A Case Study in Speed

I’ve been working with Node.js for a few years now, and I have largely stayed away from building C++ addons… mainly because I haven’t really had a reason to build one. Also my C++ skills are not that robust. Having said that, I always assumed there were ... more

My First React Application

After months of hearing everyone on Twitter scream about how amazing React is, I finally found some time to experiment and build my first demo application with it. My first impression — I like it! What’s React? React is a JavaScript library created by ... more

Electron vs nwjs

I have recently been digging into Electron and nwjs as options for deploying a web application to desktop computers as an installable binary. While both are similar technologies utilizing Node.js and Chromium, I have noticed some subtle differences that ... more

express, ssl, and nw.js

Recently I’ve been playing with nw.js to build a rather sophisticated desktop application. Reading through the nw.js documentation, you’ll see that it’s actually quite easy to take a web application and package it into an installable binary app for any ... more