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 [...]
This Saturday I infiltrated an event for girls. Girls awesome enough to dip their toes into the world of web development and programming in general. It was a bit like geek heaven. There you are, surrounded by 75 human females, every one of them hand picked to be interested in what you do. Girls who [...]
When does an Emacs user use Vim? To change a server config via ssh. Ha, haha! Ha! Awesome joke … it’s funny because it’s true! It hurts so much I’ve been an emacs user for a while now. Still don’t know all the keyboard shortcuts, text selection still confuses me to no end and I [...]
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 [...]
How do you get a hardened night owl to wake up before it’s light out? You promise a cool geek event. On Saturday I went to Webcamp Zagreb with @HairyFotr and two lasses who wanted to tourist around Zagreb while the boring geeks do their thing. After the GPS sent us to a strange settlement [...]
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 [...]
Immediate feedback. No really, it’s that simple. Most of our a developer’s revolves around verifying code. After hitting the limit of how fast you can type, the only way to think faster is getting feedback instantly. There’s actually two parts to this trick. 1. Automated testing First of all, you should write tests. No need [...]
Monad tutorials have achieved what many startups crave – hockey stick growth. This isn’t a monad tutorial. It could be a monad tutorial, but I still don’t understand monads. I don’t think I ever will. Monads were invented to fuck with us developers of lesser minds, the ones who don’t want to bend over backwards to [...]
