How Placemark implements undo/redo to make map making safe and chill
Inspired by Figma, here's a peek into how we implement mutable, command-oriented, local history
November 25, 2021
Keeping the bugs away
On Placemark's improved developer operations system, meant to make map editing fast and reliable at scale.
November 17, 2021
Escaping engineering FOMO
How to stop worrying about using the fastest web framework and just ship the thing.
November 1, 2021
Good magic with TypeScript
There are some really neat things happening in the world of TypeScript!
October 29, 2021
Charting Placemark's development statistics with InfluxDB
How I started tracking statistics about my development efforts and the health of my codebase by tying together GitHub Actions and a time-series database, InfluxDB.
October 15, 2021
Choosing atoms
One of those hard-to-pin-down engineering concepts of how to shape your data, which trickles into the whole system design.
October 13, 2021
Values
Company values are silly. But Placemark has goals, tangible things and clear ideas that I want to stick to.
September 29, 2021
Thoughts on Collaboration
Collaboration technology is really hard. Here's an exploration of the space and why I went with Replicache.
September 20, 2021
Tech brief: JSON Pointer
How JSON pointer lets you target and modify certain parts of JSON objects, and how this can be really useful for GeoJSON.
August 27, 2021
GitHub issues-only project management
My thoughts on why project management applications are often overkill, and using simple tools forces you to adopt more efficient practices as a small team.
July 19, 2021
Components: react-aria
There are lots of React component libraries. Here's why Placemark uses react-aria, one made by Adobe and focused on control and accessibility.
June 8, 2021
Hosting: Render
Here's why Placemark uses Render, a sort of "Heroku for 2021" instead of more popular options like AWS, for hosting.
May 14, 2021
The application stack: Blitz
There are lots of different ways to build a web application. It's about choosing the one that fits your problem area - here's why I ended up with Blitz.js, a level on top of Next.js, for Placemark.
May 10, 2021
Stack thinking
Here's my framework for how to think about some fundamental choices I have to make when building a company.
May 6, 2021
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