A bit abrupt a headline, no? Well, it cost me a couple of hours by doing so. […]
READ MORELast year, having tried out a Surface Pro 3 and disliking it, I bought a Dell XPS 13 ultrabook as my “travel” computer. This year? Well, Dell refreshed the range, added more memory and and a bigger SSD and suddenly I was looking at my 5-year-old Dell XPS 15z and thinking it was time to replace that. And what better way to replace it by having a single laptop that I used all the time? […]
READ MOREI’ve been talking about functional JavaScript for a few posts, but, to be honest, it’s nice to put the theory aside and just practice thinking and writing functionally. With that in mind, let see what we can do about fixing some “copy-n-paste” code. […]
READ MOREIn continuing this series of posts about functional JavaScript (one, two), I whimsically wondered if we could apply the SOLID principles of object-oriented programming. We took a look at S last time (the Single Responsibility Principle), and were fairly successful. The principle I introduced there was not only that the functions we write should do one thing and do it well. If we can embrace global immutability, so much the better (in other words, the function should not have side effects). Small functions of this type are also well worth writing since they help document the code via their names. It’s now time to look at O, the Open/Closed Principle. […]
READ MOREToday so far has been a comedy of errors with some web programming I wanted to do. A confederacy of dunce issues, one after the other. […]
READ MORELast time I took a quick look at why JavaScript can be used in a functional manner, primarily though the use of higher-order functions. Another way of putting this is that functions are objects in JavaScript, in the sense that they can be passed to and returned from other functions. And once you say “objects” as a programmer, you start thinking about things like composition, state, inheritance, and so on. […]
READ MOREYesterday evening as I was putting to bed a few changes to this blog’s JavaScript (that would provide fodder for my continuing series on functional JavaScript), I decided to update the version of JSLint I was using in Sublime Text. When I had done so, suddenly my JavaScript file produce a huge slew of warnings that had not been there before. Whaaaat? […]
READ MOREOver the Christmas break, when traditionally things are a little quieter at work, I do a bit of research into topics that interest me and that might have some bearing on our future products. This year was no exception and I decided to investigate React, Facebook’s library (framework?) for building user interfaces for the web. It’s a fascinating library to be sure (and I’ll talk more on it in another post), but there was one paradigm it uses which I haven’t really talked about before: immutability. Don’t get me wrong: sure, React components have properties and state, but the way they change (or rather are allowed to change) is very circumscribed. […]
READ MOREOK, so this afternoon I got bitten by an issue that has bitten a gazillion web developers (and will probably continue to bite more in the future). I’m talking about the syntax for the callback function that’s used for jQuery.each() versus that for JavaScript’s Array.prototype.forEach(). They are, dear reader, not the same. […]
OK, call me dense. I had a problem: the new theme I have for this blog has cute little buttons for the social networks I belong to and use; they’re at the bottom of every page. Internally they use Font Awesome to deliver the individual icons. On my desktop browsers: no issue, they look great. On my iPhone? What. The. Heck. […]
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