Articles & Talks
I’ve had articles published on various other websites besides my blog here. I also run workshops and present talks at conferences fairly frequently - slides and video of some talks are listed below.
Articles
Feature Toggles, on martinfowler.com
Feature toggles (aka Feature Flags) are a powerful technique, allowing teams to modify system behavior without changing code. They fall into various usage categories, and it’s important to take that categorization into account when implementing and managing toggles. Toggles introduce complexity. We can keep that complexity in check by using smart toggle implementation practices and appropriate tools to manage our toggle configuration, but we should also aim to constrain the number of toggles in our system.
Feature Branching vs. Feature Flags: What’s the Right Tool for the Job?, on devops.com
A dev team’s branch management strategy can have a significant impact on the rate at which it can release high-quality software. In this article we’ll explore the pros and cons of several different approaches for enabling multiple concurrent streams of dev work in the same codebase. We’ll see that two major factors—the cost of merge conflicts and the ability to release streams of work independently—are often in tension, but that Feature Flags provide a way to resolve that tension.
Javascript without the this, on radar.oreilly.com
Using closures in a different way…
Keeping jQuery in Check, on radar.oreilly.com
Segregated DOM makes for a maintainable JavaScript codebase…
Testing Asynchronous JavaScript, on martinfowler.com
Testing asynchronous javascript code usually doesn’t require a different approach to normal. You can make your unit tests be much clearer by using promises.
In Praise of the ./go Script, on thoughtworks.com in two parts
Any self-respecting dev team should pay attention to automate their processes and conventions with an array of tooling, be it off-the-shelf, customized and fully bespoke. This is where a lot of teams stop, which is a shame. It’s great to have the tooling you need, but if you don’t organize your workshop so that everything is at hand you’re not going to be as effective as you could be. Teams can get a lot more out of their automation by unifying all of their tools and processes under a common interface - the ./go script.
Conference Talks
Slides from my public presentations are published on speakerdeck
A Journey Into Feature Toggles - OSCON Austin 2017
Functional reactive JavaScript on the client and the server - Fluent 2016
overview, video part 1 & part 2