Casey Ydenberg

When I began working a freelancer last year, I knew I wanted to use an agile approach to build apps for my clients, even if they were small projects. As there are limited resources for agiling independently, I thought I would write about my experience for others to use. First of all, some terms.

Being Agile as a Freelancer

One of the best things about React is that it manages to combine almost-real JavaScript with an intuitive way to interact with the DOM. Whereas in a templating language you need a new vocabulary to have conditional statements, in JSX you can do things like: {props.visible &amp;&amp;

Functions as Props: Describing a thing by what it can do

In React is the new Dojo, Alex Russell argues that React's days as king among front-end frameworks are limited if it doesn't increase its circle of appeal outside of specialists who have the patience to learn all of the tooling that comes with it.  As he puts it:  Of all the holy wars in the web community, this has been one of the hardest for me. On the one hand, I was attracted to coding for the web in the first place because of the openness of

On React's Barrier's to Entry

I gave a talk earlier this week about how much I liked working with Fresh, but I ran a bit short on time and didn't talk about what brought me to Fresh in the first place. This seems like a good place to go into it, because the motivation for trying out Fresh was building this website! This website is in part an attempt to explore technology solutions for data-rich blogging and journalism on the web.

Rebuilding my website on the Fresh framework

Of all my regular stops for data-vis design, Our World in Data is probably my favourite. Unlike (for example) FiveThirtyEight, which keeps complex graphics and news articles on different parts of the site, and unlike news sites which embed data graphics as iframes, OWID has a unique approach to mixing graphics and prose.

Improving the user experience of overcrowded scatterplots

Front-end frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation are reviled among some front-end developers for creating bloated CSS and for making every site look the same. However, much of this hatred focuses on the use of the use of the framework as a "drop-in" CSS (and JavaScript) file.

What I want from a React UI framework: Intentions and skins in the presentation layer

One of the side effects of working with redux is that it forces you to think about your application in terms of state instead of thinking in terms of user workflow. While state might seem like an implementation detail, with experience it becomes more a part of the design process, allowing us to accurately predict "sad path" situations that may arise when the app is in a particular state.

Thinking in State: The Tao of Frontend Development

Header image: John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A lot of people smarter than me have been sounding the alarm about the potential threat that AI poses for some time, and I have chosen to ignore it. Until recently, I had never had a conversation with an AI that sounded even halfway plausible.

Consulting the Oracle

Knowledge does not come from nothing. It can only come from reason, from experimentation, or from preexisting knowledge.

War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery [citation needed]

In April,

 The Economist

proposed a new metric for measuring the climate impact of food. The motivating factor was that while most plant-based foods are "better" for the environment that most meat-based ones, they also contain fewer calories and less protein, and therefore more of them are needed to make up a full meal or diet.

The Banana Index: Interactive

One of the most predictable trends in the ecology of humans is that as countries become wealthier, fertility rates decline. This means that even as mortality rates plummet and most people can expect to live into old age, the population of a country stabilizes and may even begin to shrink. The population of the world has been increasing exponentially for centuries. This period is now at an end.

A visual breakdown of demographic changes to come in this century

The wall came down, and about a month later the first episode (season 1, IMDB 8.2) of

 The Simpsons

aired on the Fox network. For 34 years the show has been locked in a kind of strange timewarp, with characters who never age, while the world around them has changed to be almost unrecognizable.

The Simpsons: An analysis of IMDB ratings by season

So, what are we going to do about Facebook? It has been clear for at least five years now, or should have been, that the status quo is untenable, not least because the era of social media seems to have degraded our ability to have grown-up conversations about important problems, and one of those problems is social media itself.

The Case Against Facebook from Evolutionary Biology

When my kids were babies, sometimes it felt like a one-hour trip to the store required more planning than an expedition to Antarctica. We had a diaper bag we packed with all the things we thought we might need, but it was the

 way

it was packed that mattered. Diapers and wet bags and wipes have to be accessible so they need to go at the top. So does a bottle of milk and a spit rag.

You Might Need Redux

A very common topic of questions on data visualization forums concerns responsive charts. In this post I will use an example of responsive chart design to illustrate the key issues when confronting this problem, outline the framework of a general solution, and show a bit of general-purpose code. The principles should be applicable to any frontend framework (React, Vue, Svelte). I'll use d3 throughout, but no prior d3 expertise is necessary.

Responsive charts: a case study

There's a strange moment that occurs during passionate arguments between close friends, romantic partners, or coworkers when two sides with deeply dug opposing trenches suddenly realize that they agree - almost - about everything at issue. When the key realization is that the two sides differ not so much about the facts, as the paradigm by which they approach those facts.

Reacting badly

It is the Flat Earthers that finally gave me pause. Not the hypothesis itself. In the spectrum of likely possible realities, I put "flat earth" in between a world sitting on the back of turtle and a direct, causal relationship between Nicolas Cage movies and swimming pool drownings. Is there, however, something virtuous in the skepticism that allows one to persist in the belief that the world is flat?

Conspiracy Thinking is Not Skepticim

In much of the developed world right now, it is possible to attend a movie but not a university lecture. This is the sort of insane fact we've gotten used to over the past few months, the sort of thing that makes us shake our heads for a moment, acknowledge that money talks, and move on with our lives.

Our Public Discourse About COVID-19 is Completely Idiotic

It’s almost forgotten now, but “Generation X” - a term now used to describe people born between 1965 and 1980 - was originally the title of a novel. Vancouver author Douglas Coupland wrote the novel and coined the phrase to describe what it felt like to be alive at a certain time in a certain point in your life.

A novel about what the Internet feels like

The oldest gene we possess carries the information to make something called the 5S RNA, a component of the ribosome. This molecular machine is responsible for translating a DNA sequence into a protein sequence. The reason this is critical is that chemical properties of DNA are pretty simple: it's more or less just a carrier for information.

In the beginning was the code and the code gave life and the code was life

I gave a talk recently extolling the virtues of PouchDB and how you can use it build web experiences that feel very much like native apps. In short, with PouchDB you can give users app-like experiences with no login, and that store data while offline. And yet they still have the best feature of web app: they can found with a URL.

Why the Frontend Keeps Getting Harder

Overall inflation seems to be cooling, but the costs of food and housing continue to soar across Canada. In October 2023, food inflation was still nearly double the overall inflation rate, and the federal governement began steps to stabilize prices through regulation of the major grocery chains. Exactly what items are behind the increased price at the register depends on where you live.

Living Pixel

In the beginning was the code and the code gave life and the code was life

War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery [citation needed]