Kyle Shevlin

A few months back, Jason Lengstorf and I started a gathering for people in Portland to get together, relax, and get to know one another. Our biggest night so far had over 30 people crowding this cozy little backroom of a local bar. It was great.

A lot of people have expressed experiencing considerable FOMO since they can't make it or the desire to have something like this in their own city. I'm here to tell you that you can…

If you look just above the title of this post, you should see a beard icon and the phrase ${strokes} bestowed. It's a fun little indicator of how many likes this post has received to date. I built this using a Firebase Realtime Database. For those of you unfamiliar with Firebase, it's a cool, JSON…

I made mention in my "What Are State Machines?" post of the fact that a state machine is a graph data structure. Each state a node. Each transition an edge triggered by an event. You remember, right? No worries if you don't, now you know.

I also mentioned you can do cool things like create a graphical representation of your state machine because of this data structure. Well, I have good news. XState has a state machine visualizer tool…

In a previous post, I explained what a state machine is and how to build one from scratch. In this post, we're going to learn how to make our first state machine using the XState library. First step? You guessed it. Install the library into your project.

npm install --save xstate

Next, we're going to get the Machine function and the interpret function from the library. These functions are very similar to the ones I made in the other post, so these…

Defining and managing state in software is a difficult challenge. Even simple systems can often be more complicated than they first seem. State machines provide a reliable interface for handling these systems and are capable of handling problems from the simple to the highly complex.

A state machine, more specifically a finite state machine, is an API that enumerates all the possible (and thus finite) states of a system. For each of these states, a set of events is enumerated which defines the possible transitions between states. A state machine can only…

When I was trying to write a recap of 2018, it became obvious to me that it would be easier to split what I wanted to say into two posts. The first, the one you're reading here, is a review of how I did on my goals for 2018. The second, which I will add a link to here when it is published, will be a…