A Programming Life: Choose Your Own Adventure
I caught up with, Amye Scavarda (@amye), Client Advisor, Acquia, and Leslie Hawthorn (@lhawthorn), Community Manager, Elasticsearch at OSCON 2013 where both gave a talk on how to grow a career, that...
View ArticleHTML5 is the Future of Book Authorship
In the past six years, the rise of the ebook has ushered in three successive revolutions that have roiled and reshaped the traditional publishing industry.
View ArticleFurloughed Federal Programmer? Five Ways to Keep Busy During the Downtime
For the first time in eighteen years, 700,000 Federal employees are sitting idle. Among them are software engineers working throughout the government, who may now find themselves with nothing to do and...
View ArticleWhat Developers Can Learn from healthcare.gov
The first highly visible component of the Affordable Health Care Act launched this week, in the form of the healthcare.gov site. Theoretically, it allows citizens, who live in any of the states that...
View ArticleTransformative Programming
“Small pieces loosely joined,” David Weinberger’s appealing theory of the Web, has much to say to programmers as well. It always inspires me to reduce the size of individual code components. The hard...
View ArticleThe Internet of Things Needs the Laws of Robotics
Joshua Marinacci (@joshmarinacci), is a researcher at Nokia, author, and speaker. We sat down recently to talk about the quickly growing internet of things and what the future might hold in terms of...
View ArticleBe a Polyglot Learner First, Then a Polyglot Programmer
Being a polyglot programmer has its benefits; most of us have read or heard about those benefits from various respectable sources. I’d like to highlight the importance of being a polyglot learner...
View ArticleSupercomputing on the cheap with Parallella
Packing impressive supercomputing power inside a small credit card-sized board running Ubuntu, Adapteva‘s $99 ARM-based Parallella system includes the unique Ephiphany numerical accelerator that...
View ArticleFunction = Var + Return: A Functional Style of JavaScript Programming
Functional programming, for most working programmers, is exotic. I’ve been experimenting with it as a way to get cleaner code and to expand my mind a bit. Here I describe a minimal approach to...
View Article7 Ways to be a Better Programmer in 2014
Coders make resolutions, no? If your to-do-better list is still empty, consider these ideas from other programmers to put to use in the New Year. Even the smartest folks have room to grow. The...
View ArticlePreventing Problems in PHP Security
As any PHP developer that’s been around for a while will tell you, there’s a certain kind of stigma that comes with the language. They’ll hear it from their peers using other languages that PHP is...
View ArticleKeeping jQuery in Check
jQuery makes it really easy to work with the DOM and other browser APIs. Almost too easy. Having the almighty $ available to you at all times can lead to an architectural style that I refer to as...
View ArticleBuilding the Right Thing vs. Building the Thing Right
I love it when companies test prototypes. Love love love it. But it makes me incredibly sad when they use prototype testing for the wrong thing. First, let me give you my definition of “prototype...
View ArticleWhy Ruby blocks exist
It seems like more and more languages these days are getting support for closures in one form or another. (Even Java is getting in on the game, finally.)
View ArticleTalking to Chromecast from iOS
Now that Google has opened up the Chromecast API for anyone to play with, it’s possibile to create iOS applications that can leverage the $35 device as a way to display to HDMI devices wirelessly. In...
View ArticleThe new PHP - Programming
The programming language many love to hate is experiencing a renaissance. This is not your parents’ PHP. The new PHP is a more mature language with community standards, a growing affinity for...
View ArticleJavascript without the this
One of JavaScript’s many wrinkles is the way that this works. It can be quite confusing, since the semantics are quite different from the purely lexical scoping rules which apply for regular variables...
View ArticleEvent-driven application design with JavaScript
When you start building dashboards for interacting with data, such as calculators, editors, or result browsers, understanding JavaScript and client-side MVC becomes important. Why do you need an...
View ArticleYes, CSS is code
One of the best things I overheard at the Fluent Conference was (more or less): “CSS live coding? I was like, that isn’t code. But then it was.” Lea Verou had changed the mind of a skeptic.
View ArticleThe Case for Test-Driven Development
Harry Percival, author of Test-Driven Web Development with Python, discusses how he got into TDD, why you should too, and shares some tips. In the podcast above, listen to Harry talk candidly about the...
View ArticleSimplifying Django
The following comes to you from Julia Elman and Mark Lavin. Julia is a a hybrid designer/developer who has been working her brand of web skills since 2002; and Mark is the Development Director at...
View ArticleApplying Design Values to Programming
For the past two decades, the Web has been a vibrant intersection of design and programming, a place where practices from art and engineering both apply. Though I’ve spent my career on the programming...
View ArticleWhat it really means when people say Everything in JavaScript is an object
When you begin programming with JavaScript you might run across books, tutorials, and people who say “Everything in JavaScript is an object.” While it’s not 100% true (not *everything* is an object),...
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