People often hire me to grab their codebase by the horns and introduce a modicum of engineering standards. Eventually I get to implement new features, but they usually come at the cost of heavy refactoring before I can even get started. A good month ago a founder emails me “Hey, I have this product, customer development at [...]
Socket.io is probably one of the coolest things to come out of the JavaScript world in recent years. Finally! Something that lets web developers create real-time apps without the fuss of thinking about websockets and long polling and all the other hacks that need to be used. The idea is pretty simple, the server can emit [...]
Sometimes you come across a library so full of promise and amazingness that you have to write about it before even trying it out. Alertify.js is a javascript library that brings alert() and prompt() into the web world of 2012. No longer will you be forced to use some arcane instruction full of ugly windows and so [...]
This is a guestpost from @Smotko, he does cool things with code and runs my favourite irc channel. I’ve started working on a simple game for the Github Game Off competition and I’d like to share my thoughts and findings on creating games with javascript and Webgl. I will not go into Webgl details, as [...]
In 8 or less characters of JavaScript write an expression that evaluates to -265. You are not allowed to use “-265″ as the solution or use the * character. The other day someone asked this on IRC. Everyone pounced on the problem and after a lot of discussion about how strange the 265 number is and [...]
Ceylon is an exciting new programming language, and by new I mean it appeared in 2011 and I heard about it last week. But it is new enough that no official version has yet been released. void hello() { print("Hello, World!"); } The brain child of Red Hat, Ceylon promises to be “a language [...]
Last night I went to the first ever github drinkup in Ljubljana. Very fun, but I was left with a lot of thinking time today. After a lot of wandering my thoughts ended up on the World Wide Wasteland article I wrote for Zemanta a few weeks ago. A realization hit me – I suck [...]
One of the best features in Djangois the test client that comes with the test framework -> blackbox testing baby, yeah! Blackbox testing is my favourite kind of testing. Much more useful than unit tests and generally a lot easier to write, maintain and deal with. And that’s because rather than making sure all your [...]
I’ve been actively coding for 15 years now, ever since I’ve discovered the Interwebs. If you count in the lectures I took for ZX Spectrum 48 during my elementary school, this range stretches to more than 20 years, but that was more fun than business. In this time, I’ve developed more than 50 different pieces of software, mostly business-oriented information [...]
The more I look at it, the more it seems drawing graphs in javascript+html is the only viable option to get anything decent and useful. Gnuplot‘s graphs work, but they’re not all that pleasant to look at. Same goes for the graphing tools I’ve seen in python. Mathematica, I’m told, does a very decent job, [...]
