A couple facts about three cool technologies node.js is a powerful way of writing backend code in JavaScript; why JavaScript? Because you have the kind of problem that benefits from asynchronous code (the average web app) and you like using the same brain for backend and frontend work mongoDB is an awesome NoSQL data store [...]
Last time I played around with Appcelerator Titanium I didn’t get a chance to really put it through its paces. Mostly because I wasn’t getting anywhere … I remember spending hours, even days, just figuring out how to get a Hello World to run in a simulator. Yesterday was my lucky day! Not only did I [...]
A couple of days ago I decided that doing my graduation thesis on a topic that, when suggested, brought a sparkle to my mentor’s eye and made him suggest I might want to think about picking a co-mentor just wasn’t hard enough – so I decided to do the whole thing in Haskell. I want [...]
The past few months have seen an explosion of client-side MVC frameworks. Wikipedia lists eleven of these things! And yet even a year ago the majority of developers was perfectly content with jQuery. But as browser apps become ever more powerful it only makes sense to realize callback soup isn’t fun and hey, wasn’t there some [...]
You know that one piece of shitty code that always makes you cringe? Something along the lines of months = ['Jan', 'Feb' ....]; dateString = date.day()+’ ‘+months[date.month()]; Yeah that piece of code. Let’s talk about that. It sucks. There is a special circle of hell for people who do it and yet JavaScript developers are forced [...]
Not only was my nondeterministic turing machine implementationway too long at 20 lines, it was also wrong. Shortly after @dionyziz reported a bug and it took me until last night to get around to fixing it. The problem was that when I was passing tapes for each possible step into the next iteration of the [...]
Over the weekend I started working on llamaduck- a simple tool that aims to figure out whether your code will run on the newly released node 0.6.0. Eventually it might be able to perform other compatibility assessment tasks as well, but I’m focusing on simple stuff first. Or at least I thought it was simple. [...]
Last night as I was rewriting the CSS for postme.me from scratch and I was cursing and shouting obscenities under my breath and trying to find a way to punch all of Mozilla in the face over the internet … I discovered something silly. Scaling images is something every developer on the web has had [...]
For a long time now I’ve been completely in love with functional programming to the point that I write functional-style code even in run of the mill normal languages. There are many reasons I like functional code, the paper Why functional programming matters, by John Hughes sums up my opinion perfectly. A few days ago [...]
Knowing how many readers a blog gets is pretty important for any blog writer. We like to pretend it doesn’t even matter, put on a face of “Oh well, I’m just writing this for myself, you know, to get the word out, I don’t really care if anyone reads it” What a bunch of hipsters! [...]
