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Tag Archives: programming

“…they will go off and work in the integrated development environments…”

by !undefined

What Is Code? If You Don’t Know, You Need to Read This:

They will do their standups. And after the standups, they will go off and work in the integrated development environments and write their server-side JavaScript and their client-side JavaScript. Then they will run some tests and check their code into the source code repository, and the continuous integration server will perform tests and checks, and if all goes well, it will deploy the code—perhaps even in August, in some cloud or another. They insist that they’ll do this every day, continuous releases.

Read every word. Every one of those 38,000 goddamn words. Even if it takes you 6000 hours.

surrounded by all that framework magic

by !undefined

Why I Don’t Want Your JavaScript Framework but I Love You:

A very worthwhile read from Keith Rosenberg.

If there’s a tl;dr then it’s this: choose when to use a framework, not which framework — if you choose any framework at all, and/but/so when you do: take the time to get to know the source code, not just the docs.

Rosenberg has lots of good points in here, and while no single pithy quote jumped out as pull-worthy, it’s worth noting that he doesn’t simply dump on frameworks (as some do) but rather tries to ask the more interesting meta-question re: why are you even choosing to use one at all?

Obviously there are plenty of reasons to use a framework. There’s that old adage about either spending your time learning the framework or spending your time building all the home-brew infrastructure that turns in to your own personal framework. What Rosenberg points out though is that if you’re not digging deep into the source, then you’re not really learning, and you wind up in a bad place anyway — surrounded by all the framework magic that’s undocumented and you don’t understand, can’t debug, and spend days trying to work around, over, under, or through.

(Having been guilty of the above, and having been there myself, I cannot stress that enough.)

As he says: take the time to think about your problems and spend some time designing your application and discovering what you really need, instead of just diving in with your AngularJS life-jacket because that worked out so well on that last thing your build.

(Previously/related: RE: Developers are calling it quits on polyglot programming.)

the programming equivalent of staring at the abject

by !undefined

“But it has always seemed to me that confronting unfathomable code is the programming equivalent of staring at the abject, of slowing down to peer into the carnage of a car wreck.”

“The Beauty of Code”, an excerpt from Geek Sublime, by Vikram Chandra, as it appears in Paris Review.

Linkdump for May 3rd

by Rob Friesel

Google Web Fundamentals I see this and I can't help but think Could we please get WebPlatform Docs out of alpha before embarking on any new comprehensive resources? (tagged: WebPlatform Docs Web Fundamentals Google webdev documentation ) Programming Sucks Peter Welch: The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now there's a whole […]

Linkdump for August 2nd

by Rob Friesel

AngularJS Pain Points A write-up by Jaco Pretorius. I agree with him on the documentation, and I (admittedly, sadly) don't have enough experience with the testing aspect to have an opinion there, but I'd be willing to split hairs on the "overall complexity" complaint. Given my experience so far, I would say that the trivial […]

Linkdump for June 18th

by Rob Friesel

Pre-generating Justified Views Ross Harmes on how the Flickr team achieved a 7× speed increase in page render times: The first time you come to any Flickr page, we store the width of your browser window in a cookie. We can then read that cookie on the server on subsequent page loads. Gotta love a […]

Linkdump for March 27th

by Rob Friesel

Programming languages ranked by expressiveness The Donnie Berkholz graph that's making the rounds. At the very least it's interesting, even if you ("I") don't necessarily agree with all the results and suspect that the data may indicate a sampling bias. (And as a friend points out, he doesn't seem to have accounted for whether/not the […]

Linkdump for December 14th

by Rob Friesel

Joy of Clojure: Annotated Bibliography (tagged: bibliography programming Clojure ) Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 (Windows) In case you need to worry about this sort of thing: here's the MSDN doc that breaks down the differences between "real IE10" (on Windows 8) vs. the Windows 7-compatible IE10 "Release Preview". tl;dr: Unless you're dealing with […]

Linkdump for December 3rd

by Rob Friesel

The HAR Show: Capturing and Analyzing performance data with HTTP Archive format Ilya Grigorik and Peter Lubbers on Google’s “Make The Web Fast” show, talking about HAR and tools that you can use to analyze the data. (At GoogleDevelopers YouTube Channel.) This is great. Here are their notes, and Ilya’s associated blog post. (tagged: HAR Google http […]

Linkdump for October 8th

by Rob Friesel

WebPlatform Docs Looks very promising. MDN has been my go-to for answers like this for the past couple of years, but with all those organizations working together (Mozilla included) it could turn into the new canonical source. (tagged: reference documentation JavaScript SVG HTML CSS web ) Programmer Competency Matrix Some of this seems useful. Some […]