If only all thinkpieces on complexity in software development were written in such an entertaining style! (Although, admittedly, that would get very old very fast.)
A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained
A great little history lesson from Amber—ah, Firebug!
Amber documents a very handy bit of DOM scripting when it comes to debugging focus management: document.activeElement.
Cassie and I were swapping debugging stories. I shared the case of the 500 mile email with her. She shared this with me.
I love this example of paying it forward:
Google hijacking and hosting your AMP pages (in order to pre-render them) is pretty terrible for user experience and security:
I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain.
A good developer…
- debugs
- follows the KISS principle (and respects YAGNI)
- knows how to research
- works well with others
- finds good developer tools
- tests code
Rachel’s fantastic talk from Patterns Day. There’s a lot of love for Fractal specifically, but there are also some great points about keeping a pattern library in sync with a live site, and treating individual components as reduced test-cases.
Remy walks us through his performance debugging routine …and now Una must write him a song.
I was just helping out with some debugging at work and it reminded me of this great talk/post by Remy:
- Replicate: see the bug
- Isolate: understand the bug
- Eliminate: fix the bug
Regular expressions are my kryptonite. I’m rubbish at them and I can never keep the vocabulary in me head.
Mark recommended this tool so I’m going to give it a go the next time I have to resort to regex.
Kenneth has isolated Chrome’s dev tools into its own app. This is a big step towards this goal:
Why are DevTools still bundled with the browsers? What if clicking “inspect element” simply started an external DevTools app?
With DevTools separated from one specific browser, a natural next step would be making the DevTools app work with other browsers.
Adobe have launched their version of Weinre, the tool that allows you to refresh and debug iOS and Android browser views from your desktop computer.
Here's a handy little trick from Paul: use conditional comments to add a class to your BODY element, allowing you to target IE without a separate stylesheet.