Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202312091517 MVPs should be vertical slices

MVPs should contain a full vertical slice of the application. Instead of delivering a UI or API without the other, we should fully scaffold and build each layer of the system and deploy it before releasing an MVP. This way, users get a real experience, we get real feedback on our designs, and a path to incrementally building functionality instead of doing big lifts.

This is also known as Tracer Bullet design.¹

Thomas, D., & Hunt, A. (2019). The pragmatic programmer, 20th anniversary edition: Journey to mastery (Second edition) (pp. 50-55). Addison-Wesley. ↩