I was raised as a Republican. My deprogramming started when I noticed our actions were rarely living up to our words.

Still, I wanted to believe that when the shit hit the fan, at the deepest level of moral bedrock, there were some fundamental American values we still shared. What’s been hard for me to accept over the past 4 years is that there is no moral bedrock. There are no shared values. The waft of hypocrisy I smelled at age 18 was a rot that has totally hollowed out the core of the Republican party.

As a senior engineer in a new role, it's tempting to focus on bold, sweeping changes that justify your lofty title. This is a mistake. Your first order of business is building trust with your team. Nothing erodes that trust like revisiting plans they're already executing on. Reopening months of decision-making frustrates your team and sends the message that you think you know better than them. And even if you think their plan sucks, you're still so new that you're going to miss things. You need more context.

My feelings about React hooks are mixed, but I do feel strongly about one thing: there's no way React would have gained its current popularity if this was the starting place. Old React was simple and fun and “just JavaScript.” New React is more powerful and more correct and better all around—at the expense of becoming a weird magical meta-language on top of JavaScript.

Are there any studies showing web performance improvements yielding revenue increases *outside the context of e-commerce*? The data I’ve seen comes from highly transactional, low-margin scenarios. What I’ve heard from friends (outside e-commerce) is that every time they’ve poured in major engineering resources in to improving performance, impact to business metrics like revenue is small, if statistically significant at all.

In US public school, we were never taught that:

1. Iran had the first democratically elected government in the Middle East.
2. In 1951, Mossadegh, a secular pro-democracy lawyer, was elected prime minister.
3. The CIA led a coup to overthrow him. You’re pissed off about Russian interference in elections. Now think about how Iranians must have felt when CIA operatives:

1. Posed as Communists and bombed a prominent Muslim’s house.
2. Controlled most Tehran newspapers.
3. Paid an army general $100k to lead the coup.

Webpack desperately needs competition. People are asking what I would want to see in a competitor. Basically, something focused on ingesting modules and code-splitting them.