experiments by [hyam](https://www.twitter.com/hyumankind)

experiments by hyam

Serotonin

Create and sell digital collectibles secured with blockchain technology. Rarible is home to thousands of artists and collectors, creating and exchanging immutable art without using code. Trade with RARI token on OpenSea.

Rarible 1155

Rarible

Homeostasis

BBLs(BearBrick Labs NFT) are a collection of 1055 uniquely generated artworks living on the Ethereum Blockchain, they are largely collaborative designs

BearBrick Labs

Ether

BearBrick Labs #671

mannys.game is a browser based 3D NFT video game manifesting across the Ethereum blockchain. Unlock NFT integrations and win contract based games to climb the ranks of the leaderboard and lead the manny metaverse.

mannys.game

The most common Manny type. Not needed to win the game, but may be useful later. Visit https://mannys.game/1186 to interact with your Manny.

Manny #1186

Rarible V2

Six Point Plan

Tempest

Web3 technologies are democratizing the internet, creating an inclusive space where everyone has an equal voice - regardless of any aspect of identity.

In the traditional tech space, women are vastly underrepresented, holding only 20% of all tech jobs. 

Developing on decentralized blockchains is liberating developers around the world, allowing them to participate in a permissionless, transparent ecosystem where everyone can express themselves through their code equally. 

This piece showcases women exploring the Metaverse, freely expressing their skill sets and navigating the space.


-


Twitter: @guccitr0ll

Exploring the Metaverse

#: 36
Name: SASS3HH6AAAA

SASS3HH6AAAA * is a symbol of the bygone cartoon era of the 1930s. He inspires viewers to experience the authentic magical atmosphere of the modern animation’s dawn. The robot has incorporated such genres as rubber hose, retro cartoon 1930's and lowbrowart. If, when anyone mentions these genres, you recall only retro Mickey Mouse, then SASS3HH6AAAA is definitely able to change your point of view and show you all the variety of styles of that era. The main mission of the robot is to revive and rethink the works of that time and present them to the public in a new light, carefully preserving the key elements of the works of their idols. Do not be deceived by the external good nature of SASS3HH6AAAA, because among his main hobbies are satanic orgies, where he invariably makes a triumph with a combination of animation and his dark beginning. He is also often called to lectures at universities and museums, where he acts as a "live" exhibit of art history. He consists of nostalgic sadness, genuine smiles and retro animation.

SASS3HH6AAAA * is an exclusive robot created in collaboration with the artist Sasshhaaaart (https://taplink.cc/sasshhaaaart). Especially for the SASS3HH6AAAA robot, Sasshhaaaart and the Chatex team have created an authentic robot that embodies the cartoon retro era of the 30s.

SASS3HH6AAAA

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains are secure domain names for the decentralized world. ENS domains provide a way for users to map human readable names to blockchain and non-blockchain resources, like Ethereum addresses, IPFS hashes, or website URLs. ENS domains can be bought and sold on secondary markets.

ENS: Ethereum Name Service

charliewilco.eth


You ever stare at a pull request (PR) with 40 open comments, all of which require resolution or response in order to merge your work? I have. I learned loads from those, we would get into great discussions documented right in your project. But it's a double-edge sword, you can learn a lot from these experiences and at the same time it can also suck the life out of you leaving you just a desiccated hunk of VSCode shortcuts and a mild caffeine addiction.

It doesn't have to be that way. It can actually get worse, pull request reviews can become a politic dumping ground and a toxic element of broken engineering cultures and horrible teams.

You deserve better.

You invested in the work you did and your reviewer invested energy and attention into reviewing it. It's easy to forget that, your reviewer is an impediment to your progress, and you're a distraction from whatever they were working on. You both are worthy of respect and kindness.

So I developed a system for PRs I like to float when I'm working with teams. I call it: _Ranked PRs_.

These are kinda my rules for Ranked PRs:

- Keep things low stakes for both the reviewer and the author.
- Buffer harsh interactions with sincere praise.
- Make opportunities to bail
- Automate as much as possible

But the manner for doing all of this is pretty blunt: **_If you're leaving a comment on someone else's work it should be qualified or at the very least categorized._**

In practice, I end up prefixing each comment:

- **REQUIRED** must resolve the following comment, usually provide a link for more context or example
- **QUESTION/CLARIFICATION** = must respond to question or create follow up comment
- **NIT** can be ignored, usually response to stylistic preference or consistency
- **COMMENT** general, no need for resolution
- **PRAISE** encouraging

Emojis for some teams might be neater:

- ❗️ = must resolve the following comment, usually provide a link for more context or example
- ✅ = must respond to question or create follow up comment
- 🙄 = can be ignored, usually response to stylistic preference or consistency
- ✨ = general, no need for resolution
- 🎉 = encouraging

This accomplishes two big things:

1. You get a focused scope as the reviewer to work in. You can prevent a lot of hassle from knowing you have a finite way of responding; fewer rabbit trails to go down and clearer targets to hit.
2. You give the author of the PR a way to navigate your feedback. For instance, if they've got 4 REQUIRED comments, they can resolve them quickly and focus on bigger pieces of feedback.

It ends up looking like this:

![A comment on a code review with a NIT flag](/images/posts/pr-post-1.png)
![A comment on a code review with a REQUIRED flag](/images/posts/pr-post-2.png)
![A comment on a code review with a PRAISE flag](/images/posts/pr-post-3.png)

Making praise and ignorable comments a key part of this setup makes it easy to call out growth and identify what issues you should let go of in time. For instance do I actually care if someone is casting something to a type? Maybe I do, maybe I don't, but calling it out gives them an opportunity to explain or ignore you and you can be okay with either. Should another engineer get some praise for making a cleaner abstraction for that one thing that bugs everyone? Yes, yes they should.

However, I have found some caveats (YMMV):

1. In teams that are growing I’ve found this method for commenting works effectively, especially when you have a mix of junior and senior engineers.
2. If you present this as a prescriptive solution it will fail, it's usually better floated as a discussion topic or an experiment.
3. If you haven't automated formatting and code linting rules (think SwiftLint, Prettier, ESLint, etc), you're in for a bad time. It's not worth the collective energy to keep calling these things out and usually ends up looking like dog-piling on someone. Like just set it up and if someone has a real issue with it, have a conversation and be flexible. (My experience has been bad managers don't like these tools but they don't have to write the code so 🤷.)
4. If you have someone new to a team or new to coding and it's their first PR, setting expectations of "Hey, 40 comments is totally normal, not an indicator of anything wrong" can be so helpful.

There are some tools that can help make working like this a little bit easier:

- [Jiffy](https://sindresorhus.com/jiffy): This is really great for adding GIFs to a PR because you can just drag from a menubar app directly onto GitHub
- [Add PR Comment](https://github.com/mshick/add-pr-comment): I've used this to automatically add the legend of what comments mean what anytime someone opens a PR. It works pretty okay.

![A legend for PR comments](/images/posts/pr-post-legend.png)

---

Ultimately GIFs and emojis cannot fix a broken engineering culture, but a little bit of levity and lowering the stakes of giving feedback fosters a more giving group of engineers.


Reviewing Pull Requests Like a Human


During the 2020 election, I, like a lot of people watched CNN for 4 straight days. I heard John King and Wolf Blitzer say at least 15 times, that "we've never seen anything like this" and something occurred to me, if I hadn't lived through it, I didn't know much about American history or not as well as I thought. King was right, we hadn't really seen someone refuse to concede in a presidential election, we hadn't seen that level of voter turnout and we hadn't really seen an incumbent prematurely declare victory. I know this because I watched every televised concession speech in the history of this country (it was like 2AM on the West Coast and I couldn't sleep).

Then I kept looking into more modern US history, like how single-term presidents didn't get reelected or why the New Deal was so important or how RFK was poised to reshape the Democratic party.

So I became hooked and then found myself being very annoying (more so than usual) with all these little tidbits of information that provided more of a backdrop to what I was seeing. I got obsessed with re-learning a lot of things: science, history, geography. I got really into reading more about queer people throughout history, it's given me more understanding of myself and how far we've come and how far there is still to go (but that's another blog post).

### Trivially

Sometime in early December our project manager got bored of how stale our daily stand-up meetings had become. She suggested a "Dad Joke Wednesday" and "Trivia Thursday". The first Thursday this came up, no one could come up with a trivia fact off the top of their head, but having just listened to the news before we started I asked: "What constitutional amendment gave us the sheer displeasure of listening to Ted Cruz?". Then I had an idea to make this a little game for our team. I like learning, I like game shows, I tried playing a lot of other trivia apps on the Play Store and they didn't click for me.

<figure>
  <img src="/images/posts/trivially-desktop.png" alt="Desktop version of the app" />
  <figcaption>
	  Desktop version of <a href="https://trivially.fun">Trivially</a>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

In my ["Twenty Twenty"](/writing/twenty-twenty) post, I talked about this problem I had with shipping. I'll start a thousand little projects and they never get further than an abandoned repository or a document in Figma. But I started this idea and put a small prototype together fairly quickly. Then [Sabrina](https://sdrp.me/) started to encourage me and my dad played that first version on the web.

I decided to call it [Trivially](https://trivially.fun) and it's available on the web and for [iOS](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trivially/id1553937746) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.triviallyrn).

Sabrina really stepped in, played every alpha version of the native app I built, wrote questions for the app, critiqued the questions I would write. It was an absolute joy to get to share and build something with my someone.

#### Stack

Okay some technical details...

The app is built with React Native. My day job is mostly working with React Native and that seemed like the best fit for what I wanted to release. I used [React Navigation](https://reactnavigation.org/) for routing, [Apollo Client](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/react/integrations/react-native/) for data fetching and [Redux Toolkit](https://redux-toolkit.js.org/) for application state.

The content management system I'm using is [Sanity](https://sanity.io).

The site is built with [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/). For data fetching I'm using their incremental static site generation features and on the client I'm using [SWR](https://swr.vercel.app/) with [GraphQL Request](https://github.com/prisma-labs/graphql-request). For styling I'm using [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com/) and I'm even using their new [JIT plugin](https://blog.tailwindcss.com/just-in-time-the-next-generation-of-tailwind-css).

Obviously, I used TypeScript everywhere.

### Wanna Play?

Anyway, I built this thing because I liked learning and re-learning history and writing the questions got me way more into that. I'd be really happy if you downloaded my game. It's not perfect and I have a few ideas 🤔 for some new features ✨ like a light mode 💡 and presentation features 📽 because I've loved playing this in a group. And if I'm in a meeting and people start talking about Gantt charts, I'm likely on mute, writing questions and furiously Googling who the first something or was to do something in the Senate.

So if you think you know what the first US Mars mission was called, who Sargon the Great was, or which island in the Malay Archipelago is the largest, this game is for you. Even if you didn't know that Gerald Ford had his name changed, or the scientific name for a pineapple, or that Aretha Franklin got her start singing in her dad's church, or when Genesis broke up, I still think you'll enjoy it.

[Trivially](https://trivially.fun) is available on the web and for [iOS](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trivially/id1553937746) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.triviallyrn). Tell me how you like it or if there's something horribly wrong with it!


Wait, I Thought I Knew That


I guess it's time to look back at a year where the world shut down, the state of denial tried to re-elect an incumbent president who tear gassed a church and a good portion of the planet was literally on fire.

Back in September I mostly wrote about what had [transpired throughout last year](/writing/transitions) and most of that hadn't really changed. After that I decided I really wanted to try to go back to school in 2021 and started to plan some projects to do outside of work.

So this was _my_ 2020:

### Takeaways

The Good:

- I started to feel really competent and that I've met some level of proficiency at writing code and leading people. In the last position, I took up a lot of mentorship and found there was a lot of capacity in myself to teach and be available to help people learn and grow. To be honest, I had no idea that capacity existed in me and I'm glad to have found it.
- Actually using the therapy I've spent thousands of dollars on. I have spent almost half a Bitcoin on therapy during the Trump administration. One of the things I've learned that for me, the best antidote to anxiety and stress is data and information. During an election year, sensationalism is high, during this election year sensationalism is like oxygen to liberals and kerosene to conservatives. Going through each headline designed and putting it in an historical context has been enormously helpful. For instance the lack of concession from the incumbent this year, watching the concession speeches or lack of concession speeches from one term presidents let me frame what was happening for what it was versus what it's being purported to be. The only reason I got to do that this year was because of the lack of commute and overwhelming amount of time I've had to myself this year.

The Bad:

- Lacking any focus on having any real tangible goal this year was difficult and every time I tried to center in on one, I talked myself out of it. I didn't feel productive or like I had any resolutions on much of anything. But that was bound to happen, I'm just glad I'm not alone in this.
- I've had some level of insomnia for most of my adult life. This year was worse than any other, because of the pandemic and lack of typical social structures. The only thing I did differently was I stopped caring when I went to sleep or woke up and just completed the same routine during the wake cycle. I stopped assigning value or shame to not being able to sleep or get enough sleep and that helped. But the three or four days in a row where I slept about 9 hours total in April were brutal.

---

The ability to survive this year should be a milestone for anyone. I'm content with that in and of itself and nothing can take that away for us.

### Projects

I did work on few projects this year, I didn't ship one of them, which goes back to the lack of focus.

- [**Feedbin Client**](https://pre-alpha.reubin.app/): I love RSS, it's one of the best parts of the web. The service I use, [Feedbin](https://feedbin.com/), has a responsive site and it works okay and they have an actual iOS app but no Android app. When I went back to Microsoft, it was on a React Native project, so I thought I'd revisit React Native to build an Android client for Feedbin. They have a well-documented [API](https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin-api). So why not? 🤷‍♀️
- [**TypeScript Course**](https://typescript.wtf): Over the last two or three years, I've used TypeScript pretty much exclusively. Last October I had the idea of putting a screencast series together and I scribbled out an outline in a notebook. I gave up on it shortly after that because the first time I tried to record my neighbor in the apartment building started making so much noise that I couldn't concentrate. Now that I live in a house, I thought I'd pick it back up. I started writing and 30,000 words later I think I'm close to being done on that one. I hope to share more about this very soon. 📝
- [**Downwrite**](https://github.com/charliewilco/downwrite): I started this project years ago and I've never shipped it. I get time to work on it in little pockets of time. It's supposed to be a Markdown editor that's supposed to replace Canvas, a start-up that shut down a few years ago. I haven't had much of a product vision for it or direction and it's pretty buggy. Over the holiday I picked it back up and started really plan what I wanted the product to be and wrote a lot of tests to start capturing some of those bugs. 🐛

#### Never Shipping

There's a theme with all of those projects and most of the side projects I work on. I never ship them. Something goes wrong, life comes up or I lose interest or concentration on them. None of that is wrong or bad but it doesn't feel great. There's so many great frameworks and tools to release a product that cost almost no money and I really want to build things and ship something.

So how? I literally have no idea other than to define a clear scope, stick to it and intentionally make time to do it. That's something I'm hoping to do this year.

### The Year as Remember It

God, enough fucking tech stuff.

<figure className="Post__figure--left">
  <img src="/images/posts/hawaii.jpg" alt="Beach" />
  <figcaption>Beaches and alcohol. Winning combination.</figcaption>
</figure>

I started 2020 by actually taking a vacation for the first time in my life. I never thought I could afford it or I didn't feel like I had time, but I was wrong. We went to Maui and it was so good to stare at an ocean for 5 days and have cute waiters bring me alcohol with pineapple in it.

When I came back, I had all this energy and I decided that since it was an election year I wanted to participate in a real way in the Democratic primaries. I made calls and texted for Elizabeth Warren's primary campaign and it was AMAZING. I learned so much, made hundreds of calls, had rednecks hang up on me, made fun of Michael Bloomberg, like a lot, met so many cool people, and actually got to hear her speak. It's still a bummer that she didn't get more delegates before the convention but I think her message still permeated the Democratic platform and the convention. Hopefully, those ideas make into the Biden administration's first hundred days.

On March 6th, I started working from home at the company's urging to prevent the spread of COVID-19. By the 23rd, Governor Inslee issued the first shelter in place order "Stay Home, Stay Healthy". It was miserable working at a company who was transitioning to remote work for the first time. I couldn't say enough that there was no use in trying to replicate the in-office environment virtually. The people I was working with were finding it hard to adjust and all the time there was no real end to what we were experiencing, I thought everyday our contractors were going to get cancelled. Several hundred contractors at Google had their agreements severed very early in March. May 1st, the governor issued another order, that's when I think people around me and I started to accept that this was a permanent situation.

But during that time, I did jigsaw puzzles for the first time in years. I watched all the shows I never had time for. But I also had time to immerse myself into my work and I found it harder and harder to take my finger off of the pulse of everything going on in Slack. It was hard to not consume news constantly. There was a week I couldn't sleep more than a couple hours a night.

<figure>
  <div className="ImageGrid-4x4 ImageGrid-4x4--no-spacing">
    <img src="/images/posts/mandolin.jpg" />
    <img src="/images/posts/guitar-rack.jpg" />
    <img src="/images/posts/korean-epiphone.jpg" />
    <img src="/images/posts/jaguar.jpg" />
  </div>
  <figcaption>Didn't go overboard enough with this hobby.</figcaption>
</figure>

For my birthday, my partner bought me that mandolin and that was a trip, my hands still feel to big for it. 🤣

I did find one thing to throw my energy into during this year. At the beginning of the year I was at lunch with some co-workers and was joking about how I my resolution was to play music more. So after we ate, I made our group purposely late to a meeting, and we walked to a music store around the corner. The group thought I was kidding so I called their bluff and bought a guitar on the spot. I fell in love with it, even my fingers weren't calloused and I couldn't change chords fast enough. I kept enjoying it, I took guitar lessons over Zoom, scoured tab sites and met a few cool musicians. I'm still over a year later, enjoying it.

Towards the summer, the racial tensions in this country broke. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Manuel Ellis, Ahmaud Arbery were all murdered by police. The protests and demonstrations mounted, at the time I was living in Capitol Hill and was literally next door to where the now infamous Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone was established. The police instigated riots, tear gassed peaceful protests (some of which ended up through my window, in my tiny apartment with one window), mandated curfews and threw flash bangs at members of the free press.

But it wasn't just Seattle, it was Portland, St. Louis, NYC, DC, Louisville, Philadelphia, every major city. The whole country, couldn't avoid this topic. There were a few things I learned about race from this year:

1. I benefit from institutional racism, but that doesn't mean I need to be complicit. Being complicit often resembles ignoring the problem, not recognizing the privilege and not being willing to challenge those around you.
2. This is America, this is a seminal part of our history and ignoring it doesn't help.
3. The only actual dangerous minorities are the filthy rich and the United States Senate.
4. Democrats need the black vote and will fundamentally ignore it the second an election is over and virtue signal until they need it again.
5. Tech is not apolitical and trying to push politics to the side in and of itself is a political decision. To exist in the world is to be political.

<figure className="Post__figure--left">
  <img src="/images/posts/office-profile.jpg" />
  <figcaption></figcaption>
</figure>

Around July, we moved from Capitol Hill to Kent to get more space. Being stuck in a small apartment with two people working full-time from home wasn't an option. I finally got my own office space. I wrote about that [more here](/writing/transitions) (and there's better and more pictures). Having a place that is mine, that I can have my therapy sessions, take calls, binge TV shows, hide from the world was the kindest thing I think I've ever done for myself.

Election Day came and is still actively being disputed today. Seriously, I watched CNN for so long I developed feelings for Chris Cuomo. That's more than enough CNN for a lifetime. One really interesting moment happened at like 1AM on Thursday morning. John King was dissecting the vote count in Mifflin County (where I grew up) on the electoral map of Pennsylvania with Wolf Blitzer. He said the following about that county (emphasis mine):

> In these places **hardly anyone** lives, the President runs it up and in population centers in Pennsylvania: Montgomery County, Chester, Delaware County, he will always trail democratic voters.

I just thought it was exceptionally funny he referred to where I grew as a place that hardly anyone lives.

The other really notable thing that happened to me this year was getting interested in investing and with cryptocurrency; which could be it's own post. I invested in ETH and Filecoin and Uniswap. If you're a crypto person, DM me, I have tons of questions.

But I digress.

---

It's not lost on me how incredibly lucky I've been and how much privilege I benefit from. This year made that abundantly clear. 300,000+ Americans died, 22 million Americans lost their job, 21 million Americans have contracted COVID-19. (If these numbers don't make sense, to put it in perspective, at the end of 2019, the population of the United states was ~328 million people.)

I'm still alive and I had the incredible fortune to be able to function and almost thrive without really needing to leave my home.

#### Books Read

<figure className="Post__figure--right">
  <img src="/images/posts/prettiest-star.jpg" alt="Hardback copy of The Prettiest Star on my ottoman" />
  <figcaption>It was so good and heartbreaking.</figcaption>
</figure>

I found it really hard to read and concentrate this year but I did manage to read a few books. Two of my favorites were:

- [_The Prettiest Star_](https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-prettiest-star/) by Carter Sickels; it's a story of a boy dying of AIDS in a small town in 1986 and some of this was hard to read, mostly the townies reacting to finding out he had AIDS. I don't think before this year I read a lot of queer fiction or a lot of queer fiction set in moments of queer history. It honestly made me cry.
- [_High School_](https://teganandsara.com/highschool/) by Tegan and Sara Quin; it's their dual recounting of their years in high school and forming their duo. The audiobook was very immersive, it had archived tapes and performances along with both of them reading it. I had never been a super fan of Tegan & Sara and this book really changed that for me.

### 2021?

I do have some goals for 2021.

Basically, survive.

If I can handle that one, I did write that course and I want to release it. I feel like I'm sitting on so much cool stuff to share. Like I have a couple of mobile applications that I built with React Native that I talked about. They should be in the Play Store in 2021.

Anyway, happy belated new year to everyone and I would love to hear how you got through 2020!


Twenty Twenty


Everything is changing again, as it tends to do often.

### Moving to a house

At the beginning of the summer, I was 3 months into working and living at out of a 1 bedroom apartment with my partner, who was at the time out of work. Because of the pandemic, and all of the "stay-at-home" orders in Seattle, that's tight quarters to be spending most of your time. That apartment had an open kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom. I'd primarily been working in the kitchen and it's hard to share that space when you're working 12 hour days, half in Zoom calls and the other half divided between triaging JIRA tickets and actually coding.

<div className="ImageGrid-4x4">
  <img src="/images/posts/old-apartment-wine.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/old-apartment-wfh.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/old-apartment-moving-in.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/old-apartment-flowers.jpg" />
</div>

As much as we loved living in the city, we had to admit, this wasn't the same city anymore and our daily rhythms weren't suited for such a small place. So Sabrina and I moved down to a huge place in Kent, not too far from the commuter train but far enough that I don't have to hear it.

Now, I'm not in love with Kent but I certainly love And I setup a better office for myself. Gotta say, I love working out of here and having my own space that can just be mine is just affirming in ways I can't describe.

<div className="ImageGrid-3x3">
  <img src="/images/posts/office-chair.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/office-desk.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/office-deskchair.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/office-dual-monitors.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/office-fridge.jpg" />
  <img src="/images/posts/office-profile.jpg" />
</div>

### Back to Microsoft

<figure className="Post__figure--left">
  <img src="/images/posts/surface-equipment.jpg" alt="Pot of tea in front of bookshelf" />
  <figcaption>Honestly didn't think I'd ever buy a Surface product</figcaption>
</figure>

After working at my last engagement for a year, I got the opportunity to go back to Microsoft and now I'm working with the Xbox team on A/B testing with React and TypeScript.

I was at Microsoft for most of 2018 and [2019](/writing/twenty-nineteen#work-transition) and I'm really excited to be back. I always feel like I'm growing in someway at Microsoft more than any other engagement I've been on.

One really awesome part is being able to dive back into use React Native again for the first time in like 4 years. Microsoft has their own port of React Native that targets Windows 10 SDK, you can run React on UWP apps, Xbox, pretty much anything running Windows 10.

### New Gender

In the midst of all of this and having more time to slow down and think during lockdown, I started to ask some questions about gender and how I understand myself and where or if I fit on the gender spectrum. Started to come to the conclusion I don't identify with the gender binary. Not him or her, just them.

People come out to be seen and understood as something different than the conception they have or present to others. I'm non-binary and I'm using [they/them](http://pronoun.is/they/.../themselves) pronouns. I went into a little more detail on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/charlespeters/status/1277690247359246341?s=19).

---

Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully I feel like I can blog more in the future. ☕


Transitions


A common interview questions is: What the difference is between `function.call()` and `function.apply()`? I didn't really know the answer to this one and if you read the docs from [MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/call), it's not super clear how either of those is different from normally invoking a function.

### Invoking a Function

Let's use this function as an example:

```js
function someFn() {
  console.log("Something");
}

function someFnWithArgs(name) {
  console.log("Hello from this demo function, ", name);
}
```

Typically you'd invoke a function like this:

```js
someFn();
// Logs "Something"

// We pass a parameter to the function to represent "name".
someFnWithArgs("Charles");
// Logs "Hello from this demo function, ", "Charles"
```

### Other Invocation Methods

One of the hardest things to understand in JavaScript is `this`. `this` is the context of a given scope. If you call `this` outside of a function, you're referencing the window object (provided you're running this in a browser).

```js
console.log(this);

// Window {parent: Window, opener: null, top: Window, length: 4, frames: Window, …}
```

Functions can create a new scope and then `this` refers to the scope it's now in:

```js
function createElement(textContent) {
  const element = document.createElement(this.elementName || "div");
  element.textContent = textContent;

  return element;
}

createElement("Calm down");

// <div>Calm down</div>
```

If we invoked this function normally. We'd return a `<div>` element, but maybe we want to call this function with a different version of `this`. We can pass a new version of `this` through `createElement.call()` and `createElement.apply()`.

```js
createElement.call({ elementName: "h1" }, "Title");
// <h1>Title</h1>

createElement.apply({ elementName: "h1" }, ["Another Title"]);
// <h1>Another Title</h1>
```

This is the main feature of `function.call()` and `function.apply()`: to redefine the function's context (`this`).

### The Difference between `.call()` and `.apply()`

The difference between these methods is how you pass parameters to the function, one takes them comma separated like the normal invokation and the other through an array. People on [StackOverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1986896/what-is-the-difference-between-call-and-apply) have commented that you can remember the different by remembering **C** for comma and for `call()` because it takes it's arguments comma separated and **A** for array and for `apply()` because it takes it's arguments as an array.

Normal invokation will always be faster to process than `call()` or `apply()`; `call()` tends to perform better under stress tests and than `apply()`, you can see those performance tests [here](https://jsperf.com/function-calls-direct-vs-apply-vs-call-vs-bind/6).

### Binding

Now let's say instead of giving a function a new context (`this`) and invoking it, you need to only give the function a new context and call it later. This is the use case for `function.bind()`.

```js
const titleCreator = createElement.bind({ elementName: "h1" });

titleCreator("Hello");
// <h1>Hello</h1>
```

Here our `titleCreator` is now bound to that new version of `this`, so every time we call it, we have that same `elementName`.

---

One great reference I come across a lot on this topic is [_Understanding This, Bind, Call, and Apply in JavaScript_](https://www.taniarascia.com/this-bind-call-apply-javascript/) from Tania Rascia. It goes more in-depth into understand `this` and how it applies to all these other methods.


Charlie ⚡️

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About this Site

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Reviewing Pull Requests Like a Human

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Twenty Twenty

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