In 2011, I created the Orin theme for this blog — layering a bunch of then new-to-me CSS3 styles on top of the “naked” Starkers theme. It was a perfect combination for me: Starkers provided the barebones mark-up and the WordPress-flavored PHP … and I got to do “the rest”. Fast-forward a year and I […]
The Gentle Art of Patch Review:
Recently recommended to me by a friend, this post posits that effective code reviews have three phases. First: is the proposed idea even “good”? (Is it consistent with the project’s aims? Does the feature add value?) Second: is the architecture correct? (Stay out of the weeds; keep the feedback high-level.) Lastly: is the patch polished? (Now is the time to unleash your inner pedant and invoke the iron fist of the style guide.)
Sharp argues that this style of code review benefits the maintainers, the contributor, and the community around the software project. It allows for the right level of feedback to happen at the right time, and because of that, it avoids problems with people getting (for example) over-invested in a patch that isn’t appropriate to the project, or else getting discouraged because of nit-picky feedback right off the bat.
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, […]
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 […]
My first hands-on exposure to AngularJS was when I wrote my Patented Project Management Dev Dice. It is admittedly a trivial app–hardly worth the name–but I used it to get familiar with the absolute basics of the framework. 1 But now that I’ve been using Angular for a couple weeks to build a non-trivial application, […]
Today’s moment of Angular zen: Try to think of it this way: Anything that you set on the scope object in the directive’s return object, those will be the properties pre-populated on the scope argument passed to the scope parameter in the function assigned to link. And those can be inferred from the attributes passed […]
Just like it says on the tin, Functional JavaScript (Michael Fogus 1; O’Reilly, 2013) is just that: a book about writing JavaScript in a functional style with Underscore.js as the foundational library to give you some of the higher-order functions you need to get started. 2 First, a disclosure: I have a very personal relationship […]
Among the myriad of powerful features in Git, cherry-pick is probably the cause of and solution to most of my source control problems. I use it often, and probably way more than I should; I say the former because it seems like the obvious way to selectively and surgically move around “just those” changes, and […]
Last night was the third BurlingtonJS meet-up, and it seems to have been another success. Attendance was good and the crowd was once again pretty engaged. Always fun, always a room full of smart people, always good discussion. This month, I had the privilege of presenting, and took a few pages from chapters Michael Fogus’s […]