Reviews, speculation, and other idle thoughts on hardware, software, firmware…
“I suspect that even the designers of Unix shells are often surprised at the inventive uses developers have wrought with their simple but powerfully composable abstractions.”
–
Neal Ford, Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven
A post on composable systems (vs. contextual ones). It’s a thoughtful post, and worth a slow and careful read.
I gave a talk on AngularJS directives recently and a good portion of that talk focused on defining the types of scopes that those directives can have. As something that the talk’s attendees could refer back to, I decided to put together this short blog post. It captures the spirit (if not the exact words) […]
I meant to post this a couple weeks ago but… Well, I’ve been pretty busy. Anyway, in case you haven’t heard me rambling on about it between November and now, I’m working on a book for Packt called the PhantomJS Cookbook. It’s based around PhantomJS, discusses its core APIs, and contains recipes to help front-end […]
Having just wrapped up Client-Server Web Apps with JavaScript and Java by Casimir Saternos (O’Reilly, 2014), I’d say that I mostly got out of it what I wanted, and that it serves as a good jumping-off point for developers that want to build “modern” web applications on top of the JVM. More than anything else, […]
Reminder and/or public service announcement. (via How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub)
Mike McMillan’s Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript (O’Reilly, 2014) uses JavaScript as a vehicle for introducing a number of fundamental computer science concepts. It reminds me a little bit of Tom Stuart’s Understanding Computation 1 — that is, it’s a book about CS topics that targets people without a CS background. One might consider […]
I just finished up reading Practical Data Analysis by Hector Cuesta (Packt Publishing, 2013) and overall, it was a pretty good overview and recommends some good tools. I would say that the book is a good place for someone to get started if they have no real experience performing these kinds of analyses, and though […]
I just wrapped up High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik (O’Reilly, 2013) and it just may be the best technical book I read in 2013. I first encountered Grigorik and his work about a year ago when I was researching web performance and HAR tools in particular 1; it wasn’t long after that that […]
Packt Publishing recently released Jasmine JavaScript Testing by Paulo Ragonha (@pirelenito), and I just wrapped up reading it this morning. I’ve read a few books on JavaScript unit testing 1 and at least one other that was dedicated to Jasmine, 2 and this one is a strong entry. If you’re unfamiliar with Jasmine, Ragonha will […]
Vermont Code Camp 5 (#vtcc5) was a blast this year. As much or more fun than last year. I’m impressed how little ol’ Vermont can attract such a big crowd for an all-day-Saturday tech event (and on such a nice day, too) — including speakers from up and down the east coast. I had a […]