found drama

get oblique

“…they haunt it.”

by not another Rob?

Jon Michaud, A Science-Fiction Classic Still Smolders (The New Yorker):

In his introduction to the collection [Beyond Armageddon], Miller noted that the stories shared a nostalgia for things that have been lost. “Post-Megawar stories are about an afterlife,” Miller wrote. “Survivors don’t really live in such a world; they haunt it.”

A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those true all-time greats of the science fiction canon. It captures something at once unique about the twentieth century’s Cold War angst, but also something universal and timeless about our fears of annihilation, especially a self-inflicted one. I’m overdue for a re-read.

last shameless self-promotion of 2014, I promise

by Rob Friesel

So I got word this morning that my book (you know the one), PhantomJS Cookbook, is part of the ebook promotion that’s going on at the Packt website through January. Anyway, I promise this is the last time in 2014 that I’ll blather on about that book here on this blog. Anyway, check out their promo site and then go get yourself an ebook version of PhantomJS Cookbook.

$5 Packt promo

“more than just picking a few JavaScript solutions”

by !undefined

Planning A Front-end JavaScript Application: Thoughtful piece by Cody Lindley over on the Telerik Developer Network. Even if you don’t agree with all of his points, he definitely sketches out a good framework for how to approach the problem of getting your application off the ground.

A couple of additional points here:

  1. Don’t get caught up in the specific technologies that Lindley is using in this article. They’re just there as examples, and he doesn’t appear to be strongly advocating for any of them — just that you consider something to fill in that blank on your project.
  2. There’s a bit of YMMV going on here depending on the specifics of your situation. That being said, most of the key lessons here should be easy to adapt – give or take a couple of questions on the checklist.

Again: look past any knee-jerk disagreements you might have (e.g., API first development; e.g., no RWD for “web apps”) and draw out the larger questions.

Abraham Polishchuk on AngularJS Performance

by !undefined

With AngularJS Performance in Large Applications, Abraham Polishchuk presents us with a fairly comprehensive break-down of some performance do’s-and-don’t’s for large AngularJS applications. 1 He covers some basic/foundational JavaScript performance techniques at the beginning before diving into the AngularJS specific items. The key takeaways seem to be:

  1. to limit the number and contents of scopes and
  2. to avoid the AngularJS event system.

Some of it reads like FUD (“Don’t use filters!”) but there’s also good advice here, especially with respect to limiting scope and in particular his points about limiting the use of $watch.

That being said: this seems to align with my recent criticism — that it isn’t so much that AngularJS itself isn’t performant, but that it’s (arguably) too easy (using the “by default” features) to get yourself into a poor performance situation.

  1. Although there’s nothing in here specifically about the sizes of the applications themselves.[↩]

Neville Samuell on AngularJS Expressions

by !undefined

In Learning AngularJS Magic: Expressions, Neville Samuell presents a very approachable and easily digestible explanation of AngularJS expressions. He introduces the $parse service and goes as far as introducing the lexer, which is great because by the end of the post you will have a good understanding of the expressions themselves but also how AngularJS interprets them.

He manages to strike the right balance of keeping it high-level and easy to understand, but without it being condescending, and still getting into some of the technical specifics.

review: Lean UX

by Rob Friesel

Lean UX

Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX (O’Reilly, 2013) is, to my eyes, an outline for the principles of the Lean UX philosophy, and a handbook for integrating it into Agile teams. “But wait,” you ask, “what exactly is Lean UX?” A serviceable definition from the text:

Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of a product to light faster, in a collaborative, cross-functional way that reduces the emphasis on thorough documentation while increasing the focus on building a shared understanding of the actual product experience being designed.

“But wait,” you continue, “isn’t that basically Agile and/or Scrum?”

And I say: “Maybe?”

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