Shell scripts, JavaScript pedantry, CSS fixations, Java debugging, and the rest of the polyglotism.
If you’ve been programming in Grails for a year (give or take) and are ready to go deeper than the tutorials and docs usually take you, then Burt Beckwith’s book — Programming Grails (O’Reilly, 2013) — is going to feel like just what the doctor ordered. If asked to sum it up as a pithy […]
Last night as the inaugural BurlingtonJS meet-up at the Office Squared space. As an attendee, I would call it a success. We had two fantastic speakers: Agilion’s Pete Brown (@beerlington) who gave a good intro to Ember.js (summarized thusly); and Draker’s Ian Metcalf, who demoed an attempt at building a Prezi alternative using Backbone.js and […]
While hacking on a personal project recently, I noticed that WebStorm asked me if I wanted it to watch my SCSS files and automatically recompile them. I knew immediately what this must be (“file watchers!”) and was excited because this was a feature that I’d been missing. How had I not known that this was […]
I’ve been using Git as my VCS-of-choice for a few years now. It’s a powerful tool for source control, and like so many other awesome tools: it takes minutes to learn, and a lifetime to master. If you’re new to Git, there’s a fantastic round-up of tutorials and resources over on Six Revisions; or if […]
“Just give me a list of the URLs of all the scripts on this page, OK?” For those times when you’re not sure of all the things getting loaded on the page, but you need to know those things, and you need some quick and convenient way to just get that damn list.
Or: an almost certainly incomplete but hopefully accurate enough (and succinct) front-end developer’s guide to charsets and character encoding. Before we begin, I will summarize the problem with the following picture: Do you see those funny diamonds with the question marks in them? That’s about the size of the problem, right there. 1 You have […]
tl;dr: It’s a 150 page essay on auto-boxing, full of dangerous code examples and anti-patterns and soft warnings to “not do what I just did”, and some of the wording is not-wrong-but-not-quite-right, but hey there are some decent parts, I guess. Cody Lindley’s JavaScript Enlightenment (O’Reilly, 2012) has an awesome title, and I wanted very […]
A little JavaScript nugget re: scope-safe constructors: The crux here is how the scope-safe trick (with instanceof) turns the constructor into a factory for itself, which allows you to pass it to map or any similar function where you might want to operate on a whole bunch of items.
An (apocryphal?) tale: 1 when Brendan Eich unveiled the original JavaScript (nee LiveScript, nee Mocha) prototype at (then) Netscape, it was a Lisp. 2 It was only at management’s insistence that the language received a C-like syntax, and even then it was mostly to have some kind of syntactic parity with Java (with which it […]
Right off the bat, and just so we’re clear about this: I read an “Early Release” edition of Mark Ethan Trostler’s Testable JavaScript, and in a lot of places… it shows. I’m sure it will come through editing and be a lot tighter by the time you read it. 1 Putting its rough “Early Release” […]