Last night was the second BurlingtonJS meet-up and once again it felt like a huge success. Many thanks again to Patrick and Pete for organizing it; there was a great turn out and a lot of great discussion. The theme of the night was Node and the presenters did a fantastic job. First up, Dave […]
Evan Hahn did us a favor and slapped together this primer for us: JavaScript Testing with Jasmine: JavaScript Behavior-Driven Development (O’Reilly, 2013). It’s short (around 50 pages), so you can burn through it in an afternoon, but he hits the high notes and (most importantly) provides a clear path for how to get started using […]
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.
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” […]
Katie Cunningham’s The Accessibility Handbook (O’Reilly, 2012) is a concise and specific introduction to accessibility (a11y) and 508-compliance. Cunningham provides a “walking tour” of the major types of disabilities that web developers need to consider when creating a site for a11y, illustrating how people with those disabilities will use a site, and then detailing easy […]
Well this one is coming up fast… I’ll be speaking at VT Code Camp 2012 this Saturday (September 22nd) at 1:30pm. The title of the talk is “Like a Genie from the Lamp: Headless JavaScript BDD with Jasmine and PhantomJS” and here’s the abstract: Jasmine is a mature BDD test framework for JavaScript, and though […]