I recently joined the developer team at Khan Academy. Since arriving I’ve been surprised by a number of intentional decisions the organization has made to empower its developers. Whether you’re working in tech or just curious about the inner workings of Khan Academy, there’s some great wisdom in how things are done here. All aboard! A benefit of working at an education startup is that everyone naturally puts a lot of thought into information design. As a result, this has been the smoothest onboarding I’ve experienced. Onboarding…

An entirely skippable preface (Seriously, we don’t start building it until the third section.) While going through some of my dustier folders on a flight to Hawaii I came across . It’s a lovely book with plenty of inspiration for simple demos; perfect plane material. After working through a few chapters, I moved my particle system and canvas logic into their own util.js file. Until then i’d been creating a new HTML file for each demo, manually adding the title, script includes, and next/previous links. This meant that I had to edit each file to include util.js. It was a frustrating amount of overhead considering each demo only took a few minutes to write. didn’t someone…

Today we hiked the Kalalau Trail and swam beneath the cold spray of a waterfall. Today we discussed the finer points of the axolotl protocol used by TextSecure. Today we delighted in “shave ice”, a local delicacy that is definitely not a snow cone. Today we wrote copy, polished features, closed bugs, and merged pull-requests. Measured by lines of code, today was short. Measured by steps taken, it was tall. Measured by ideas discussed, things learned, and sights seen, it was towering. For the past week and a half I’ve been trapped on an island among a team of brilliant hackers. A curious duality exists on the island. At sunrise, stand…