https://idmontie.github.io https://idmontie.github.io/favicon.ico https://idmontie.github.io RSS for Node Wed, 25 Feb 2026 04:29:59 GMT Wed, 25 Feb 2026 04:29:59 GMT In a previous article, I discussed Surfaces as an abstraction on APIs and how we could measure complexity as the size of that surfaces' perimeter – the "visible" part of the API to consumers. I shared this article with a colleague who I was actively working closely with on a new implementation of a design system. They has some interesting feedback on different ways of reducing complexity of certain APIs that I felt compelled to revisit this topic.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2026-02-01-api-complexity-revisited 2026-02-01-api-complexity-revisited Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT I've discussed full and partial objects before on this blog, and in this article I'm going to investigate a common factory pattern in Typescript that can lead to type-holes. When writing tests or complex components, I'll often create prop factory utilities.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-12-07-spreading-type-holes 2025-12-07-spreading-type-holes Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT We all know that naming things is right up there in the top three most difficult things about programming, right next to concurrency and caching.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-11-22-naming-things 2025-11-22-naming-things Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT At the height of the GPU craze, around 2021, when everyone was holed up in their homes due to COVID, the 30 series of Nvidia GPUs was extremely difficult to purchase. The scarcity was due to a few factors: the COVID pandemic had disrupted supply chains across the world, Taiwan was experiencing a severe drought that was impacting chip production, and cryptocurrency, especially ETH, was gaining value, making mining it was the latest GPU series incredibly lucrative.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-06-16-gpus-best-buy-queues 2025-06-16-gpus-best-buy-queues Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT In my previous post, "On the Addition of Fractions, by Petri Mengoli", I wrote that the following inequality holds, with no proof

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-06-15-mengoli-fractions 2025-06-15-mengoli-fractions Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT In 2008, Steve Ballmer once famously said “Developers, developers, developers” in a highly meme-able video. He was trying to emphasize the importance of software developers in business and that their importance was only going to continue to grow. Microsoft shifted to try to support software developers, noticing that if they supported developers, they would build better software for Windows, which in turn would make people want to use Windows.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-04-21-agents-agents-agents 2025-04-21-agents-agents-agents Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT I was researching the origin of the Basel problem to write a short blog post about how Euler approached the problem (only to get beaten by anime characters talking about it).

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-03-16-on-the-addition-of-fractions 2025-03-16-on-the-addition-of-fractions Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT Maintaining growing software is challenging. Poorly architected APIs and incorrect abstractions can significantly impact the ability for engineering teams to deliver new features in a timely manner. If we consider an API's complexity as being a significant contributor to its overhead, maintainability, and ease of use, then it becomes a question of how do we best measure this complexity so that we can make informed decisions about how to refactor and improve our APIs.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2025-01-12-api-surfaces 2025-01-12-api-surfaces Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Every system has its limits. When designing and architecting systems, sometimes we as engineers like to assume things can scale infinitely. Maybe we can use larger machines, or maybe we can deploy more instances of a service. But even trying to scale systems isn't magically infinite. It's a smart move to understand the limitations of what we are building upfront so we can make better technology choices, and squeeze the performance out of our existing systems.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-12-08-the-breaking-point 2023-12-08-the-breaking-point Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT In my projects list on this blog is a set of projects related to Clarity Hub. This was a startup I did with a group of friends where we aimed to create software to enable software product teams to gather customer feedback, and then action on it.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-11-19-reboot-clarityhub 2023-11-19-reboot-clarityhub Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT We've all felt it at some point in our careers: that dreaded feeling of impostor syndrome kicking in as we find ourselves in over our heads. Questions like, "Am I truly qualified for this?" and "Are my peers facing the same challenges?" often plague our minds.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-09-24-impostor-syndrome 2023-09-24-impostor-syndrome Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT When building web applications, enforcing that strings be localized to the user's preferred language can sometimes be achieved via lint rules. But what if we could enforce proper localization using types in TypeScript?

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-19-localization 2023-08-19-localization Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT A common pattern in larger application when trying to track feature usage is to try to namespace events. For example, you might have a button that you want to track clicks on. For the sake of this article, we will use the data-track attribute on elements to track their usage, but you can imagine this works with any tracking implementation where you may need to explicitly call a tracking function (e.g. track(namespace)).

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-17-feature-context 2023-08-17-feature-context Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT When trying to be as type-safe as possible in Typescript, there are times when you may have to dynamically construct an object. You know as a programmer that all the keys will have values, but because you have to dynamically construct the values, the type system doesn’t know that the object is complete:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-14-partial-objects 2023-08-14-partial-objects Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT Below are some notes I’ve taken from setting up new code repositories and onboarding new team members. Hopefully they can help improve your current documentation and notes to make onboarding a smooth process.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-13-reviewing-frontend-applications 2023-08-13-reviewing-frontend-applications Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT When creating more complex systems, there are times where you will want to ensure that an array contains every value of a defined type. We have a union of primitive literal types to define the possible values a type can have:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-12-ensuring-all-of-type 2023-08-12-ensuring-all-of-type Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT The crypto craze has died down, but if you are working on Smart Contracts or thinking about creating a new blockchain projects, security is a huge part of making sure the project is successful. Since Smart Contracts often interact with cryptocurrencies, blockchain assets, or other tokens, it’s important to make sure the Smart Contract is secure and follows best practices.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-11-smart-contract-security 2023-08-11-smart-contract-security Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT We don’t get a lot of information using typeof in JavaScript or TypeScript. At most, it tells us whether a value is undefined, number, string, or object. If you want to get the class name using a function, you can use the following extended version of classOf that is originally from “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-10-get-class 2023-08-10-get-class Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT In “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”, there are functions described in 6.5 Enumerating Properties that probably shouldn’t be used in production code because they modify their input parameters: extend, merge, restrict, and subtract.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-09-enumerating-properties 2023-08-09-enumerating-properties Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT In “Javascript: The Definitive Guide” there is an example that uses Object.inherit to inherit the prototype change. JavaScript defines a method Object.create that creates a new object using the given argument as the prototype of that object. Translating the examples from The Definitive Guide to Typescript, it looks like:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-07-object-create 2023-08-07-object-create Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT Back when Meteor was in vogue, they popularized the concept of “Data on the wire”. This was the idea that the UI would be updated with changes from the dataset it is subscribed to.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-08-06-data-on-the-wire 2023-08-06-data-on-the-wire Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT The following is a checklist I like to use to ensure I'm covering all the bases when building a component library. It's a work in progress, but I hope it can be useful to others.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-07-26-component-library-checklist 2023-07-26-component-library-checklist Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT I was working on a project and I noticed the tsc check that we ran on pre-commit hooks had become dramatically slower. I was seeing near instant times to type check the entire project go to agonizingly slow minutes to check the project. I was able to narrow the range of commits to some change we made within a month window. I’m sure I could have narrowed it down by continuing to git bisect and re-running time npx tsc, but it was much easier to just check out main and try out the following:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-07-24-tsc-debugging 2023-07-24-tsc-debugging Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT, just like everyone else. But why has it become so popular? It truly is a revolutionary piece of technology. Is it The Next Big Thing? Will it really replace all of us?

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-07-23-chatgpt-coding-loop 2023-07-23-chatgpt-coding-loop Sun, 23 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT The Backend for the Frontend (BEFFE) is typically stateless and acts as a proxy for other services, including authentication, authorization, and core services. The recent divorce of browser code being rendered by backend services was created by SPAs - Single Page Applications. In simpler architectures, a SPA and service could be as simple as:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-07-21-backend-frontend 2023-07-21-backend-frontend Fri, 21 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT We are starting to see a rise of novel use-cases for AI in products and games using LLMs. Rather than the simple chatbot like experiences we have seen in the past using AI, we are starting to see feedback systems being added to these experiences, providing additional context to the LLM than just the past conversation.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-07-03-llm-loops 2023-07-03-llm-loops Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT While working on the Clarity Hub NLP API, we had a common use-case where we would create embeddings from text, and use those embedding to determine cosine similarity with other embeddings. Doing this required loading all of the embeddings in-memory and then computing cosine similarity with the entire dataset. As the dataset grew, this operation would get incredibly slow.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-07-01-fast-embedding-lookingup 2023-07-01-fast-embedding-lookingup Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT Github Copilot and other AI tools are hitting the scene. I decided to create my own Visual Studio Code extension, which is designed to use OpenAI’s APIs to bring some additional ChatGPT functionality into the code editor. The goal with Sora was to enable a developer to thoughtfully write a comment about the code they would like the AI to write, and then commit to it – rather than the real-time typeahead that Github Copilot provides.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-06-06-sora 2023-06-06-sora Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT One of the first PC games I played was Starcraft and the expansion Starcraft: Broodwar. We didn’t have a PC, so I had to play it on a friend’s computer, but I remember being immersed in the real-time strategy gameplay.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-05-06-gptp 2023-05-06-gptp Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT Dark Emblem is an NFT project that was sparked by the idea of combining cards games with Crypto Kitties. You can buy packs, open them to collect random cards, and then use those cards to battle raids with others.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-04-02-dark-emblem-rewrite 2023-04-02-dark-emblem-rewrite Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT Looks like everyone is trying to discover ChatGPT’s limitations. In one article I read, the author asked whether ChatGPT can play 20 questions. The human in this scenario tried to play 20 questions with ChatGPT, and found that they needed to guide the AI to ask questions. From my perspective, it looked more like a failure to engineer the initial prompt correctly.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-01-24-chat-gpt-doesnt-understand 2023-01-24-chat-gpt-doesnt-understand Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT I was thinking about all the little projects I work on and how they grow over time. The applications end up hitting some milestones and end up needing similar functionality that compliments the core features. A small project ends up getting complex enough that it requires some unit tests. I’ll go to deploy the project and now I need some deployment scripts and analytics to ensure the application is running correctly. The technology may change between each project, but web applications always seem to have the same steps that need to be taken to strengthen the application as it is scaled up.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-01-15-hierarchy-of-webapp-needs 2023-01-15-hierarchy-of-webapp-needs Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-01-07-clarity-hub-infer 2023-01-07-clarity-hub-infer Sat, 07 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT To kickstart the year, I created a repo that contains a simple starter kit for using NextJS with NX. You can see the repo here:

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2023-01-01-nx-nextjs-starter 2023-01-01-nx-nextjs-starter Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT This short post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into mobile considerations for web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-05-mobile 2015-01-05-mobile Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into using developer tools to help you develop your web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-04-developer-tools 2015-01-04-developer-tools Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into User Interface design for web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-04-user-interface 2015-01-04-user-interface Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into using web standards and best practices.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-04-web-standards 2015-01-04-web-standards Sun, 04 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into security for web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-03-security 2015-01-03-security Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into SEO considerations for web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-03-seo 2015-01-03-seo Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into accessibility of web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-02-accessibility 2015-01-02-accessibility Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into performance of web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-02-performance 2015-01-02-performance Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into maintenance of web applications.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2015-01-01-maintenance 2015-01-01-maintenance Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT This post was originally on a blog I started for creating web applications. This post goes into RESTful interfaces and how to design them.

]]> https://idmontie.github.io/blog/post/2014-12-30-restful-interfaces 2014-12-30-restful-interfaces Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 GMT