Matthew Eernisse

Welcome to management

I have been working in startup tech for over 25 years now, about half that time as a manager. After being an IC for such a long time, I was frankly excited to learn some new skills. I wanted to be a manager because I thought I could have more

Ghost on AWS Lightsail

When I resurrected this blog, I wasn't sure what to host it on. Not exactly morally opposed to good ol' WordPress, but my experience with that thing is that it's pretty huge, "fucking ponderous." I wanted something a little more lightweight, but not

Brain and brain! What is brain?

I mentioned in the last post, I've been playing around with OpenClaw, like so many of the Twitter tech intelligentsia who are hoping the Singularity doesn't hit before they can vibe-code a Salesforce replacement or a marketing funnel to make them kajillions of dollars. I have

All that is old is new again

I started this blog back in 2005, after I wrote my book for SitePoint. I wrote a lot back in those days, still the early days of the Web. I was working for Mitch Kapor at the Open Source Applications Foundation. I stopped posting during my tenure at Yammer, now

Major Geddy updates

In the most recent round of updates, Larz Conwell has done a shit-ton of amazing work on templates: making the templating system play nicely with various formats: EJS, Mustache, and Jade. It can now happily figure out what sort of template from the file-extension, and you can even mix and

Fleegix on Geddy

It's taken some time, a lot of late-night hacking, and tons of work by contributors like Daniel Erickson and Larz Conwell , but the Geddy Web framework is starting to grow up and become pretty fucking solid. It's finally far enough along I can replace my old

Older programmers with families considered harmful?

At a recent meetup, a guy in the community (a guy whom I generally have a lot of respect for) said one of the stupidest things I've heard in a long time (and that's saying something, given the silly shit I hear coming out of my

Logan, client- and server-side JavaScript test runner

Some of the work I'm doing at Yammer involves writing JavaScript code that runs in different environments. We're using geddy-model code in the browser, as well as with TheRubyRacer (which embeds the V8 JavaScript interpreter in a Ruby process). This code is part of the Geddy

Geddy models/validations for Node.js

The last couple of weeks have been a blast. I've been settling into my new job at Yammer, getting to know the guys on the team, and enjoying the insanely delicious food. Yes, we have a chef that comes in; it's pretty ridiculous. By happy accident,

What's next is Yammer

I've just come back from a meeting at the offices of my new employer, Yammer, Inc . I've accepted a position there as Senior Front-End Engineer, doing development work primarily in JavaScript and Ruby. I start next week, after enjoying a little family time this week --

REST easy with Geddy for Node.js

Geddy is a small Web-app development framework for Node.js. It uses a router syntax similar to Rails or Merb, and now has tools for quickly creating RESTful, resource-based routes as well. Building and installing Geddy Prerequisites: An up-to-date version of Node.js. I'm developing Geddy on Linux

Geddy: Web framework for Node.js

So I've posted previously about the embarrassment of riches that we have with Node.js modules, specifically Web frameworks. I count no less than 14 frameworks and micro-frameworks for building Web-apps with Node right now on the list of Node modules . I had actually hoped to use one

Node.js frameworks

Quite a growing list of Node.js modules and projects on GitHub. It's like a Cambrian explosion of JavaScripty goodness. If you're thinking of building a Webapp with Node, it's hard to know which of these embryonic frameworks to pick -- or if you

Reflections of a JS guy on AS3

I've been doing a bunch of stuff with AS3 at Slide, and as a long-time JavaScript guy, thought it might be interesting to record my impressions of the language so far. I'll do the bad news first, so I can end on a positive note. The

New gig at Slide, new digs in SF, new \... Python?

Okay, yeah, so I've left the blog pretty quiet the last couple of months -- it's been a busy time with lots of changes. After being without a full-time gig, doing a bunch of contract work, and looking around a lot, I accepted a job offer

Fleegix on Sinatra

The Sinatra Web dev framework has been around for a while, but I've recently been seeing it popping up a lot more. Simon Willison , the co-creator of the Django Python Web-dev framework, even mentioned it to me at SXSW Interactive when I buttonholed him after his panel on

Leaving Seesmic

I started at Seesmic a little over a year ago , and it's been great helping the platform grow from a full-page Flash app prototype to an Ajaxy Web app backed by a solid REST API. There is a time for every purpose under the sun , and now it&

Apple MobileMe using fleegix.date.Date for timezones

Sometime last year I found out that Apple was using the fleegix.date.Date plugin to build the timezone support in the MobileMe calendar, and recently had the opportunity to take a look and see what they did with it. The MobileMe calendar is quite pretty, as you might expect

Fleegix.js and Framework Scanner

A former colleague of mine, Teodor Moisa , pointed out to me recently that Fleegix.js is one of the libraries showing up in the scan performed by Framework Scanner . This is a very cool utility by Mats Bryntse that compares the impact on the global namespace by various JavaScript toolkits.

BOSH and iframe cross-domain pain

A big feature of the new Seesmic.com Webapp is our auto-update feature which provides near-real-time updates in the UI of videos as they're posted. Under the hood the auto-update uses simple long-polling of our XMPP service via BOSH, using Jack Moffitt's excellent Strophe.js library

WTF, global \"item\" symbol in IE

Like any self-respecting Web UI developer, I have a lovingly cultivated hatred of Internet Explorer. IE and I go way back -- I've been developing for IE since version 3, and I have a fairly well evolved sense of sense of what breaks there. So it's

Kerblooey accessing DOMException location property

This past week I ran afoul of an interesting bug in Firefox 3 trying to serialize some stuff with fleegix.json.serialize . Iterating over the properties of the DOMException (which for some inexplicable reason isn't an instance of a generic Error , but that's another rant) reveals

Fleegix.js 0.5.0 released

Okay, so the docs are all polished up, and tarballs/zips are freshly cooked, piping hot from the oven, so here it is, Fleegix.js 0.5.0 . Mmm, tasty JavaScript. The code name for this release is "Palace of ECMA Supremacy." Any questions or concerns regarding this

Fleegix.js, the tip of the JavaScript long tail

In a surprising recent development, Fleegix.js appears in the Six Revisions article, 10 Promising JavaScript Frameworks , showcasing "10 alternative and capable JavaScript frameworks/libraries to explore." Fleegix.js came in at number 10 on the list -- and frankly given its status (er, lack of status?) as

JSLint in Vim through Lynx

I recently saw a nice blog post by Mike Cantelon on integrating JSLint with Vim , and since I spend most of my days hacking JavaScript in Vim, it was a no-brainer for me to want that integrated-JSLint awesomeness, and right now, dammit. Of course I already had SpiderMonkey ( sudo apt-get