Software

Software is crazy, but we can manage it if we have names for the things we're building. Here's my mental map for all projects. This map was heavily inspired by a secret presentation from Safia Abdalla :) For best results, use a wide screen (1280px+).

A modern app

Editor/IDE

Operating systems
Shells + terminals
Coding agents
Extensions
Team vs personal configs

Frontends

Endless frameworks
Web, mobile, desktop
UX design

Backends

More endless frameworks
Storage
Auth
Async compute

Env

Secrets
Non-source-controllable assets

Observability

Telemetry
Alerting

Deployment

Test environments
Infrastructure as code
Automated CI/CD
Automated recovery

Documentation

Code comments
Markdown files
Wiki site
On-call runbooks

Maintenance

Project management
Test coverage validation
Perennial innovations

Communication

Early feedback
Announcements and blogs
External contributor collaboration
User support

Agents + AI

Integrations
Security
Hallucinations
Costs (financial, reputational, ecological)

Mocha

Mocha is the classic, reliable, trusted test framework for Node.js and the browser that was created in 2011. I've been a maintainer since August 2025, so I'm certainly no expert yet, but I've used Mocha significantly for testing AHK++, a VS Code extension that provides language support for a niche programming language.

Priorities

Modernization: ESM support, modern Node versions, good dependencies
Stability: Test coverage, backporting fixes, minimal breaking changes

My key contributions

Fixed critical require(ESM) bug (#5498)
Monitored and improved CI pipeline reliability (#5361)
Oversaw rewrite of "watch mode" logic (#5409)

My roadmap for Mocha

You can view my prioritized backlog, but in summary: