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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 &&

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

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.

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.