If you have spent any meaningful amount of time in the software engineering field over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed a trend. A big trend. The industry has developed a massive, collective allergy to simplicity, and the lack of care for the how things are built and work.
We take perfectly functional programming paradigms and bury them under massive object-oriented class structures. We take dynamic, expressive scripting languages and try to force them into the rigid, compiled boxes of the 1990s. We download 400MB of dependencies just to render a static blog post.
After 14+ years of writing software and documentation, building web applications, and consulting companies large and startup, I’ve decided to carve out a quiet corner here on Medium (and my personal tech blog) to talk about the craft of code — w/o the noise and slop.
My name is Tyler. I am a Senior Software Engineer who spends entirely too much time in a terminal environment configuring everything from legacy code on deprecated/backlogged systems, all the way to coding in the most up-to-date software repos for companies (and myself) — and I strongly prefer writing code that actually makes sense. It’s truly as simple as that.
What to Expect
If you know me from my other corners of the internet, you know I have a deep, abiding love for a highly specific set of tools: Vanilla JavaScript, React, Node, C, and Perl. I don’t chase the flavor-of-the-month meta-frameworks, and I truly believe Next.js is utter trash, and you only need “type safety” in rare instances across the board. I care about how things actually work at not only the high-level, but mainly the compiler and memory levels, dealing with low-level languages has become my true passion.
To kick things off on this publication, I’m currently writing two deep-dive series aimed at engineers who want to understand their tools rather than just copy-pasting from documentation or some outdated AI prompt.
Scheme in a Trench Coat: The Computer Science of JavaScript
Everyone loves to make jokes about JavaScript’s weird edge cases. Most of those jokes are lazy, and they obscure the fact that JS is one of the most brilliantly misunderstood functional languages ever designed. I’m going to tear the language down to the studs. I’ll show you the brilliant functional architecture Brendan Eich stole from Scheme, why the single-threaded Event Loop is a masterclass in concurrency, and how the V8 Engine’s JIT compiler essentially tricks your computer into running dynamic code at C-level speeds.
There’s More Than One Way to Write History: The Philosophy and Culture of Perl
Perl was the duct tape that held the early internet together, alongside C. But it’s not just some relic language of the 90s dot-com boom. I’ll explore how Larry Wall’s background in linguistics created a language that thinks like a human speaks rather than a machine, how CPAN laid the groundwork for every modern package manager (insert some stupid, lazy npm joke here.), and why a dedicated community of pragmatic engineers keeps the language thriving today. For example, did you know there’s a Perl Convention that still meets every year in South Carolina? Pretty neato.
React and Move On: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sustainable Development
The JavaScript ecosystem has been obsessed lately with “fixing” React by wrapping it in layers of complexity, heavy build steps, and mandatory meta-frameworks (looking at you Next.js). But what if React was never the problem? This series strips away the vendor-driven hype cycle to look at what made React a dominant force in the first place: a simple functional composition, predictable state flow, and a commitment to keeping the UI predictable. I am moving past the framework fatigue to reclaim a pragmatic, sustainable approach to building web/software apps.
My Baseline
I believe strongly in FP — functional programming. I believe in composition over inheritance. I believe that writing software should feel like a craft, like art, not some bureaucratic chore that — in some companies, unfortunately — it has truly become.
If you are tired of the endless churn of the hype cycle as I call it, and want to get back to the core computer science of the tools that actually run the web and software itself, stick around. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
Welcome to my terminal.
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