Breaking down programming tasks into smaller chunks …and naming things.
I’ll take a piece of paper and write the function names I’m going to implement. Or I’ll do it directly in my code editor, with real functions or comments.
It allows you to focus on one problem at a time. When you’re writing those function names, you are thinking about what the code should be doing. When you’re implementing the functions, you are thinking about how the code should do it.
Truly awful interfaces …made real.
Finally, the answer to one of the two hard questions in computer science.
I should do this in the Clearleft kitchen.
The texture here is shockingly realistic.
At first when I was reading this JavaScript coding guide, I thought “Isn’t this exactly what promises address?” but that is then addressed further down:
Before looking at more advanced solutions, remember that callbacks are a fundamental part of JavaScript (since they are just functions) and you should learn how to read and write them before moving on to more advanced language features, since they all depend on an understanding of callbacks.
Fair enough. In any case, what you’ll find here is mainly good advice for writing modular code.
This is my kind of T-shirt.
This is a very thoughtful analysis of different approaches to writing maintainable CSS, which—let’s face it—is the hard bit.
I often joke that I don’t want to hire a code ninja. Ninjas come in the middle of the night and leave a bloody mess.
I want a code janitor. Someone who walks the hallways of code, cleaning up pieces, dusting up neglected parts, shinning up others, tossing unnecessary bits. I prefer this gentler, more accurate analogy. This is the person you want on your team. This is a person you want in your code reviews.
Also, can I just say how refreshing it is to read an article that doesn’t treat the cascade like a disease to be wiped out? This article even goes so far as to suggest that the cascade might actually be a feature—shock! horror!
The cascade can help, if you understand and organize it. This is the same as any sophisticated software design. You can look at what you’re building and make responsible decisions on your build and design. You decide what can be at a top-level and needs to be inherited by other, smaller, pieces.
There’s a lot of really good stuff in here to mull over.
My hope for this article is to encourage developers to think ahead. We’re all in this together, and the best we can do is learn from one another.
The most minimal responsive, flexible grid library you can find. In fact, here’s the whole thing:
.fukol-grid {
display: flex; /* 1 */
flex-wrap: wrap; /* 2 */
margin: -0.5em; /* 5 (edit me!) */
}
.fukol-grid > * {
flex: 1 0 5em; /* 3 (edit me!) */
margin: 0.5em; /* 4 (edit me!) */
}
Slack ammo.
Disappointed in your cakes I am.
The Museum of Wi-Fi exists to preserve these vestiges of our neighbourhood battlefields.
Some are brilliantly smart, some are just purely gross. They all belong in the museum.
Seb is going to be closing out the Brighton Digital Festival with a bang.
Seb unravels all the geeky details about how your favourite retro gadgets work, including Nintendo light guns, Casio keyboards and the cathode ray tube televisions that once dominated our living rooms.
It’s going to be like Seb: The Musical …with lasers.
A gripping history lesson of the internet and the ARPANET before it, emphasising the role of government funding.
Silicon Valley often likes to pretend that innovation is the result of entrepreneurs tinkering in garages. But most of the innovation on which Silicon Valley depends comes from government research, for the simple reason that the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.
It’s precisely the insulation from market forces that enables government to finance the long-term scientific labor that ends up producing many of the most profitable inventions.
Today we have an internet effectively controlled by a small number of private companies.
Instead of trying to escape the bigness of the Internet, we should embrace it — and bring it under democratic control. This means replacing private providers with public alternatives where it’s feasible, and regulating them where it’s not.
There is nothing in the pipes or protocols of the Internet that obliges it to produce immense concentrations of corporate power. This is a political choice, and we can choose differently.
I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. On the face of it, it seems like little more than a cow-clicker, but the way that the plot and the gameplay unfolds is really delightful.
This feels like the kind of game that would only work on the web—keep it in a browser tab in the background, revisiting occasionally throughout the day.
I giggled at quite of few of these mashups.
An entertaining presentation from South By Southwest on the UI element of last resort.
It’s funny because it’s true.
I really like this piece by Jack. All the things he’s talking about—pure functions and referential transparency—are terms I was previously unfamiliar with …but the concepts smell familiar. It’s good to have terminology (and reasoning) to apply to the way I structure my JavaScript.
Ensure that your class names never go out of sync with your style declarations with this one simple trick:
Take any CSS rule you want to apply, replace : by -, and dots by -dot-, and you get the name of the corresponding universal css classname.
The only thing missing is immutability, so I would suggest also putting !important after each declaration in the CSS. Voila! No more specificity battles.
Remember: life is ten per cent what happens to you, ten per cent how you respond to it, and eighty per cent how good your reflexes are when the Tall Ones come at your throat with their pincers.