Disclaimer: As a blogger I leverage the creative license to call solutions elegant, although in reality they may be far from it. Descriptive veracity is up to each reader.
Tag: coding
Steve Yegge on the benefit of Platforms
Steve Yegge accidentally shared this memo externally on Google+ but has since taken it down, which is the only mistake he made. I’m resharing it here because my mobile safari browser had problems on the page, and I needed to keep a “fork” of it for future reference. Hands down this is the most enlightening post I’ve read on Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and programmable functional units.
Edge Cases
For interactive web apps and APIs exhaustive testing comes from a combination of internal regressions and heavy external usage. The larger the client base, the further the potential code coverage exceeds any potential internal tests. Roll out strategies ease into releases by slowly propagating changes throughout the network of clients, until stable confidence is achieved.
Inconsistent Standards or When Feeds Fail
One of the biggest time sinks I encountered while hacking the CoffeeScript Tracker 0.0 was errors with response data. The CoffeeScript that hit dedicated APIs for the most part just worked, and the closer the interaction was to pure RESTful http the better. But problems arose when querying rss and atom feeds due to inconsistencies between the formats.
CoffeeScript Tracker
I put together a simple video and feed tracker from a number of independent sources in my spare time over the past couple of days. The sources include: (more…)
Hacking the Earth, a Technical Debt Horror Story
Bloggers are notorious over exaggerators and I shamelessly confess that I’m cut from the same cloth. My tale of technical debt is no more horrific than a Gorilla in a prom dress, yet I hope it will serve as a friendly reminder that some shortcuts are better left for Jacque Cousteau’s jungle crawlers.
The secret art of the tutorial
For savvy folks who love learning, there’s nothing quite like working through a polished interactive tutorial. Today’s riff will focus on the importance of great documentation, and the qualities which separate superior experiences from failed documentation efforts.
How to bind class methods to global functions in CoffeeScript
This morning’s post is about a sticky piece of syntax I came across in CoffeeScript this weekend. I presume the problem arose due to several causes including my weekend laziness, the disconnect of errors from JavaScript to CoffeeScript, and partly because I wasn’t compiling the CoffeeScript into JavaScript to iteratively inspect the code.
Visualization layered like music tracks
The past couple weeks I’ve been fascinated by the html5 canvas element. My interest in graphics goes decades back, yet only recent experimentation with CoffeeScript showed me how fun and addicting the peanut butter and jelly combination of client side scripting and html5 canvas are to work with.
Chaotic CoffeeScript
Thanks to a helpful reminder I got the html5 chaos field working smoothly with client side file based coffeescript (.coffee) . I found the effect at Jonas Wagner’s site, and went through the practice of converting it to CoffeeScript. The process literally took an instant thanks to js2coffee. The mods took a couple of hours to determine what was too slow or just broken about my CoffeeScript modifications. The one tiny issue I have with js2coffee is replacing 2 spaces with tabs.