Ash Furrow

  1. Upcoming Conference Talk

    I'm very excited to announce that I'll be speaking at the Swift Rockies conference for iOS developers next July in Calgary. This will be my first conference presentation in over five years! My talk is titled My Slow Return to a Swift Career. I'm pecking...

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  2. Peer Lab Community Shut Down

    When I lived in Amsterdam, a friend ran a weekly meetup for programmers. He held it on Saturday mornings, to discourage people who only had ideas for apps. The idea was to spend time in a café working on projects around other coders who were working on...

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  3. Five Years in New Brunswick

    Today marks five years since my wife and I moved away from New York and back to New Brunswick. When I wrote about this last time, I seemed unhappy. I guess things hadn't worked out the way that I had envisioned them when we moved home – even if I didn't...

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  4. Joining Wealthsimple

    I'm excited to announce that today is my first day working at Wealthsimple! I'll be working as a staff developer on their mobile app. In a previous blog post, I teased that this role was a perfect fit for me. Today, I'm excited to share some details. But...

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  5. Eleventy Launch

    As I discussed previously, I've been rewriting this blog in a new tool called 11ty (aka Eleventy - the project's devs aren't consistent so I won't be either). This is the first blog post written in the new blog engine, and the migration is complete! I...

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  6. Work At Your Spikes

    I want to discuss my career trajectory and a chronic issue I've identified with my job satisfaction since becoming a staff developer. It's been subtle and I didn't notice it for years. Maybe this will resonate with you. After a lot of reflection, I've...

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  7. Floating On

    It's with mixed emotions that I'm announcing today is my last day working at Float. I've accomplished a lot here and I'm grateful for the opportunity to help shape such a young company and product team. I'm sad to say goodbye to my coworkers and I wish...

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  8. Yet Another Blog Rewrite

    In 2019, I rewrote this blog with Gatsby. I outlined my reasons in that post, but basically I wanted to use similar technology to build my blog as I used day-to-day at work. Middleman, Bootstrap, and jQuery seemed old and busted. Gatsby, React, and...

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  9. The Murderbot Blog

    I've been a huge fan of The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells for a few years now, and was very excited to see it adapted to television on Apple TV+. Every adaptation of a story to a new medium has to make creative choices and tradeoffs; it's fun...

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  10. Bias Towards Helpfulness

    I've been using Cursor for coding tasks lately, trying to explore what kinds of work it performs well and poorly. It's pretty good at most simple tasks. It's good-to-okay at some complicated tasks. But then, some simple tasks can stump it – usually in...

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