Josh On Design

  • Blog
  • About Josh
  • Books & Writing
  • Apps & Projects
  • Hire Me
past future

    Solving the NPM Problem at Scale

    March 24th, 2016

    If you haven’t heard, Azer Koculu unpublished a bunch of his modules as protest against behavior by the company that backs NPM. This crashed the NPM ecosystem with hundreds of popular project suddenly unable to build. Now there’s lots of talk about what to do. PGP signatures? Always pinning? Permacaching with IPFS?  I think Azer's goal was achieved. We are now actually talking about how brittle the system. The conversation is happening. This is good.

    Read more...

    Tagged: npm opensource programming

    Nine Months with Apple Watch

    March 6th, 2016

    Well, it's been nine months with Apple Watch and I still don't have a use for it.  After the release of watchOS 2.0 I thought that it would be a more functional device. Alas that belief was missplaced.  While there is still potential in the device category, Watch is the closest thing to a dud Apple has ever released.

    Read more...

    Tagged: apple ux

    Gwen Has A Mission and She Needs Your Help

    February 15th, 2016

    Our dear friend Gwen Fiedler is blessed with the gift to share the word of God, and now she needs your help.

    Read more...

    Tagged:

    Update to Razzmaster

    January 18th, 2016

    Thanks to a few nights of sleeplessness I've made some updates to RazzMaster, a command line tool for remotely configuring Raspberry Pis.

    Read more...

    Tagged: raspberrypi

    The Manga Guide to Physiology

    January 11th, 2016

    When I first picked up this book I thought it was for kids; similar to No Starch Press’ other comic science series: Survive! Inside the Human Body.  I was completely wrong. This is real physiology at the high school to early college level. I’ve learned quite a bit by reading through the book, and I’m a 40 year old engineer who reads constantly.

    Read more...

    Tagged: bookreview

    Call for a Data Bill of Rights

    October 8th, 2015

    Early open source pioneer Brian Behlendorf famously said, "the most important requirement [in open source] is the right to fork.” He wisely observed that the right to fork source code generally ensured it never actually be done. The mere threat of forking creates an incentive driving good behavior. Most open source communities are able to self-police well enough that true forking is a rarity.

    Read more...

    Tagged: data privacy

    The Hubbub About PubNub

    September 26th, 2015

    PubNub is a startup in San Francisco that provides a Real Time Data Stream Network as a service.  This is a relatively new concept so the easiest way I can explain it is by comparing it to a CDN.  

    Read more...

    Tagged: pubnub personal

    On JetBrains Move to Subscriptions

    September 8th, 2015

    JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ, WebStorm, and many other IDEs, recently announced they are moving to a subscription model. This has proven to be somewhat controversial.

    Read more...

    Tagged: software

    SE: A New Rich Text Editor for the Web

    August 24th, 2015

    Semantic-Editor-JS (hereafter called SE), is a new open source library for building rich text editors. You can play with the demo or get the code on Github.

    Read more...

    Tagged: javascript html

    Reflections Upon Turning 40

    August 17th, 2015

    Or: Now I Know Why Old Men Drink Scotch

    Read more...

    Tagged: personal rant

    When is it okay to duplicate another open source project?

    August 17th, 2015

    The last few weeks I've been working on a new web-based rich text editor. It’s a semantic editor, or “What You See Is What You Mean” (WYSIWYM). You edit using styles you define then import or export to whatever you need.  Following cues from Medium and others on the perils of content-editable, I stopped relying on the browser to store the model. Instead I built an internally consistent model that only uses the DOM for handling input and pastes.  This approach makes the editor robust, flexible, and very easy to customize.

    Read more...

    Tagged: opensource nodejs

    Time to Leave Nokia

    August 1st, 2015

    After a long three and a half years at Nokia I’m ready to leave. I’ve been through several re-orgs and my team has been dissolved. I’m hoping you can help me.

    Read more...

    Tagged: job nokia

    Over 40 years, has Software Gotten Better or Worse?

    July 13th, 2015

    Is software getting better or worse? Some say we are making software ever more bloated. Some say we don’t care about quality anymore; that worse is better. Some say we haven’t changed how we write software in 40 years. It's still ASCII text on disk. (Yes that would be me, saying that). Certainly our programming languages haven’t improved. We still write billions of lines in glorified C code!

    Read more...

    Tagged: software rant

    Why I Will Always Use A Speck Phone Case

    July 6th, 2015

    Yesterday, amidst the Independence Day Fun, I lost my phone.  Or rather, it flew away on the rear bumper of my mother in law’s car.  

    Read more...

    Tagged: phone

    Independence from Old Code

    July 5th, 2015

    It’s the Fourth of July again, which is America’s independence day for my non-US friends, and it’s time for some code cleaning.  I’ve built several open source projects over the last year and it’s time to shut some of them down.  Out with the old to make way for the new. Let’s review, shall we?

    Read more...

    Tagged: nodejs amino electron leosketch raspberrypi

    For I Have Met the Super-Men and They Are Us

    June 17th, 2015

    I’ve been wearing an Android or Apple Watch for a few months now and I’ve come to one conclusion. While you don’t want to buy these quite yet, when the good version comes out in a few years we will all become superheroes.

    Read more...

    Tagged: watch future

    The Holy Grail: Pure CSS Scrolling Tables with Fixed Headers

    May 23rd, 2015

    For a recent project I needed a nice HTML table library to render a long table of data with fixed headers. Figuring there must be a million of such libraries, I started searching around. This would seem to be a simple thing, yet after a day of searching I still couldn’t find a good solution.

    Read more...

    Tagged:

    Apple is not making a TV

    May 19th, 2015

    A year ago I speculated that Apple would never make a TV. If they ever did, I said they'd integrate a FaceTime camera with complex image processing, but I didn't think they would make a TV at all. There's just not enough opportunity in that market to make it worth Apple's while. It's low margin and no room to differentiate the product.  

    Read more...

    Tagged: apple

    Apple Watch doesn’t need a killer app. It *is* the killer app.

    May 15th, 2015

    As smartwatches have slowly faded into existence from their sci-fi past, I have always wondered: what is the killer app? What is the feature (or actual app) that would do something so useful I’d wear it on my wrist, put up with a mostly-off screen and laggy voice control, learn a new interface, and charge it daily. What would it do that makes me want to actually buy one despite the limitations?  After living with my Apple Watch for a few weeks I think I finally know. The watch itself is the killer app.

    Read more...

    Tagged: apple watch

    Unbuffering the Buffered

    May 14th, 2015

    I've been writing unix-ish code for more than two decades (crap, I'm old!) but last week I discovered something I'd never used before, the stdbuf command. It solves (well, works around) one of my longstanding problems working with command line programs: buffering.

    Read more...

    Tagged: unix nodejs

past future
Like this? Hire Me!