Jen Chan articles - 53 total
The Thankless Complexity of Custom Form Validations
Gripes and gotchas from building custom form validation after hundreds of hours lost to retrofitting library form components, writing and rewriting field validations exactly as clients wanted, and building accessible form field web components at enterprise.
A Mid-career Retrospective of Stores for State Management
Working on a living product after 2 years on design systems and component libraries has inspired...
The Dual Nature of Seniority in Software Development
On expectations vs. reality of senior software developer roles, and the unspoken requirement of professional mindreading for navigating politics in senior+ roles.
🛑 Stop resizing your browser: improve testing for responsiveness
An in-the-weeds tirade to put an end to the lackluster practice of browser resizing. Use the browser's device mode or a whole range of free tools to improve accuracy
Error monitoring and bug triage: Whose job is it?
The invisible and thankless work of determining the right things to fix
Dissecting the hell that is Jest setup with ESM and Typescript
World's most delightful testing framework, held hostage by Node's ESM migration in 2023
Crossing the senior chasm
Levelling up to senior and beyond: what I wish I knew
Closing, Cloning, or Disabling the Shadow DOM
Farcical experiments in seeing if I can turn a web component into not-a-web-component, and I've found answers you don't want to hear
Maintaining a Healthy-Enough Mindset through Uncertainty
How to live down the fear of being fired
Build Time, Runtime, Execution time... What "time" is it in Javascript?
Runtime, Build time, Parsing and Execution
Things Strong Developers Do That Drive Their Team Crazy
After years of nose to the keyboard, you've unlocked a level of ultra-learning you could not have imagined! How can anyting be so doable? Why aren't people as good as you? Here are some things you might be doing that make your team dynamic shift for the worse.
Ask Good Questions; Get Unblocked Faster
How to find support, when to ask, and what to ask to get help faster
On Levelling Up
Storytime for your career doldrums
Git Rebase for Preventing Merge Commits
Within trunk-based or agile development, minimizing the number of noisy commits to keep any possible...
Storybook and Chromatic for Visual Regression Testing
This post continues some thoughts around unit testing components in design systems. To boost your...
Unit Testing Components in Storybook
An overview of unit testing with Storybook for components in design systems
"How good am I?" Reflections on 5th year designer-developer doldrums
Just knowing I'm a dev
Differential Loading for Legacy Browser Support in Angular 9
For those of us who can't let go
A Stab at Performance Testing with Intersection Observer and Scroll events
About 2 months ago, I tried some very basic runtime performance testing for an app that used multiple...
How to be anti-racist , according to Black folks who work in tech
It's been another tough week, amongst many in the last ten years where black, brown and queer people...
On Being Wrong
Sometimes, and often, I am wrong. I love it. It hurts so good, and as makers and supposed-experts we...
Running IE 11 with VirtualBox on Mac
As of my time of writing, I am using a mid-2017 MacBook Pro on Catalina. (ymmv) Prerequisites: The...
Challenge: Cross-browser testing for IE11 and IE Edge on Mac for free
Looking for cheap options to support a crappy browser in a pay-to-play world
What is helpful, if you want to help
So you want to help? How?
How To Plan Scalable CSS for Large Projects?
The options, oh the options!
What are you going to do if/when your position gets automated?
Thinking out loud.
Discuss: When Is It Ok To Mutate?
To mutate or not mutate--is that even the question?
First Impressions: learning Angular after React/Redux
Another this vs that post from a dev who got comfortable with React D:
How I Approach Whiteboard Interviews
From Imposter to Candidate