Inclusion in a Distributed World

In the 2000s, when I was a teenager building web apps and browser games, I built most things from scratch with PHP and JavaScript. One reason was that I didn’t want to use any framework or library I didn’t understand, and the other reason was that things I didn’t understand felt like magic. I have since resigned to the fact that I cannot possibly understand every system. However, I spent time understanding two systems deeply: JavaScript test frameworks and bundlers. Next to compilers and type-checkers, they are among the fundamental tools that make Front End Developers effective, yet people rarely have time to learn how these tools work. This companion podcast will give you background knowledge on Jest. Tweet about this article, or share it with your friends. Discuss with the community, or email me. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!

The previous episode claimed that dependency managers don’t manage dependencies. This post builds on the previous one, and I promise it’s going to be controversial. I provide recommendations that I personally implemented and have seen work in a large monorepo with hundreds of thousands of files at Facebook. The ideas are high impact but also high effort. Let me take you on a journey of what reimagining JavaScript infrastructure could look like. Tweet about this article, or share it with your friends. Discuss with the community, or email me. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!

I promised to talk about tech, so let’s start building our JavaScript infrastructure muscles. In the next several blog posts, I’ll cover introductory topics on dependency management, the story of Jest, actionable tips for making your infrastructure better, and predictions for the future of JavaScript tooling. We’ll slowly develop our shared understanding so we can talk more deeply about JavaScript infrastructure Links from the podcast: Disk Inventory X, Packagephobia, Bundlephobia, depcheck, yarn-deduplicate, Yarn resolutions, Yarn autoclean. Tweet about this article, or share it with your friends. Discuss with the community, or email me. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!

Remote and distributed work is an unstoppable trend recently accelerated by five to ten years. It allows people to live where they want to live, and people who couldn’t move or regularly visit an office before can find better jobs. Remote work is great for a more diverse workforce, and I’m glad this trend is here to stay. However, it’s much harder to build a shared sense of purpose and build empathy for colleagues. This post exists to help people and teams adapt better to this new era. Tweet about this article, or share it with your friends. Discuss with the community, or email me. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!

It’s been almost five years since I switched to engineering management. I am by no means an expert engineering manager and I’m always looking to improve. However, most managers will define their manager principles in the first couple of years of their management career. I think of this podcast as the “Nakazawa Management Starter Pack”, and I'm sharing my priorities. I’m curious how it evolves over the years. Tweet about this article, or share it with your friends. Discuss with the community, or email me. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!

As a front-end engineer and engineering manager, I focused on building developer tools for open source projects such as React Native, Jest, or Metro for the past ten years. I am restless in searching for a better user experience, and I lose sleep over misaligned pixels. I deeply care about how people feel about the tools they are using every day. This experience informed how I think about building software, and the team I work with lives by several principles we defined together. I am sharing this manifest with you in hopes that it’ll be useful to shape your high-level thinking of developer tooling, too. Tweet about this article, or share it with your friends. Discuss with the community, or email me. Thank you for listening, and have a great day!