Adding the Three-Task Focus Rule (And Making It Feel Good)

This is the second post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 1 - Setting Up the Bare-Bones Task Manager with HTML, CSS & JS part 3 - Making It Stick: Adding localStorage and Task Persistence part 4 - The Finishing Touches: Keyboard Shortcuts, Task Editing & Delightful UX Welcome back to our vanilla JavaScript task manager series! In the last post, we built a solid foundation with basic add/delete functionality. Today, we’re adding the star of the show: the three-task limit that gives our app its personality and purpose. ...

May 10, 2025 · 7 min · me

Setting Up the Bare-Bones Task Manager with HTML, CSS & JS

This is the first post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 2 - Adding the Three-Task Focus Rule (And Making It Feel Good) part 3 - Making It Stick: Adding localStorage and Task Persistence part 4 - The Finishing Touches: Keyboard Shortcuts, Task Editing & Delightful UX Welcome to the first post in our Building a Minimalist Task Manager series! If you’re tired of reaching for React every time you want to build something interactive, or if you’re just starting your JavaScript journey and want to understand how web apps actually work under the hood, you’re in the right place. ...

May 3, 2025 · 5 min · me

JavaScript Is Loose for a Reason — Should We Be Tightening It?

This is the third post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 1 - Why TypeScript Might Be Too Much for Your Project part 2 - The TypeScript Trade-offs No One Talks About part 4 - TypeScript: Strong Types, Strong Opinions Imagine this, You’re at a jazz club, and the musicians are improvising, riffing off each other, creating something beautiful in the moment. Then someone walks in with sheet music and says, “Hold up, you need to follow these exact notes, in this exact order, or you’re doing it wrong.” ...

January 25, 2025 · 6 min · me

The TypeScript Trade-offs No One Talks About

This is the second post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 1 - Why TypeScript Might Be Too Much for Your Project part 3 - JavaScript Is Loose for a Reason — Should We Be Tightening It? part 4 - TypeScript: Strong Types, Strong Opinions TypeScript has one hell of a PR team. Every conference talk, every blog post, every Twitter thread paints it as the silver bullet that will save us from JavaScript’s chaos. “Catch errors at compile time!” “Better IDE support!” “Safer refactoring!” ...

January 18, 2025 · 7 min · me

Why TypeScript Might Be Too Much for Your Project

This is the first post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 2 - The TypeScript Trade-offs No One Talks About part 3 - JavaScript Is Loose for a Reason — Should We Be Tightening It? part 4 - TypeScript: Strong Types, Strong Opinions Imagine, You’re building a simple landing page for your friend’s pizza shop. Three pages, a contact form, maybe some smooth scrolling animations. But hey, you’ve been reading tech Twitter, and everyone is saying TypeScript is the future. “Real developers use TypeScript,” they say. “It prevents bugs!” they chant. ...

January 11, 2025 · 5 min · me

The Finishing Touches: Clear and Save Your Digital Masterpieces

This is the third post of Drawing on the Web part 1 - Drawing on the Web: Getting Started with Canvas and Mouse Events part 2 - Adding Some Flair: Brush Sizes and Colors for Our Drawing App Welcome to the grand finale of our canvas drawing app series! We’ve come a long way from our humble black-brush beginnings. We can now draw with different brush sizes and colors, but there’s still something missing – what happens when you mess up? And more importantly, how do you show off your digital artwork to the world? ...

August 17, 2024 · 5 min · me

Adding Some Flair: Brush Sizes and Colors for Our Drawing App

This is the second post of Drawing on the Web part 1 - Drawing on the Web: Getting Started with Canvas and Mouse Events part 3 - The Finishing Touches: Clear and Save Your Digital Masterpieces Welcome back to our canvas drawing adventure! In our last post, we created a basic drawing app that could handle mouse events and let us draw with a black brush. It was functional, but let’s be honest – it had about as much personality as a default Windows screensaver. ...

August 10, 2024 · 5 min · me