In the last few years I have been asked to help savor several web projects gone bad. The quality of the projects, code, environment, documentation, and morale has been low. To know what I think is right in situations like this, I started asking myself the question, "What would a responsible programmer do?". Clarity Above anything else a responsible programmer values clarity. Not only does she value clear code, but also clear documentation, clear communication and a clear vision of…

As we all know, Javascript is a very flexible language. In the article I will show different ways to execute conditional code by using some common idioms from Javascript and general object-oriented techniques. Default values Javascript does not support default values for arguments and it is common to use an if statement or a conditional expression to set default values.

I usually prefer to use an or-expression instead. The short-circuiting or, ||, avoids the repetition of the conditional operator…

I recently wrote a program, Word Maestro, which requires extensive calculations in Javascript. The calculations, permutations and searching, are very CPU intensive and hangs the GUI when performed in the foreground. Web workers to the rescue! Web workers are supported by most moderns browsers with the exception of IE (Surprise!). IE10 release candidate supports them, but it is not very wide spread yet. More info can be found at Can I Use How do Web Workers Work? A web worker…

During the holidays I had the opportunity to read the wonderful book, SQL Performance Explained and now I want to share some of my new found knowledge. The book contains a lot more information such as how joins, datatypes, ranges, etc, affect performance. In this post I will write about indexing, what an index is, what should be indexed, when to use simple indexes and when to use composite. I will be using a Postgres database since that is what…

I have just created a Git presentation. The presentation is named Git, Practical Tips, and it contains good practices that I have picked up during my four years as a Git user. The presentation consists of six parts, A quick introduction; History manipulation with merge, rebase and reset; Finding with Git; Configuration; Under the hood; and Interacting with Github. If you find this interesting and would like to hear a very practical presentation about Git tips and tricks, feel free…

If you are not a regular Vim user, your experience with Vim is usually How do I quit this damn editor, it is totally unusable! The one thing that most people hate about Vim is also its greatest feature, modes. Modes allow you to navigate and edit the file with single keystrokes allowing for very efficient editing. But in order to utilize the full power of Vim you need to know the editor well and this is where Drew Neil…

Øredev is selling tickets like never before. For the first time ever we believe we will sell out all days and not just Wednesday, like last year. So if you still haven’t bought a ticket it is time to do it now. To help you along the way I’m going to present you with another reason to register, Reginald Braithwayte Reginald has recently released some books through leanpub, such as What I’ve learned from Failure and How to Do What You…

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson The quote from Emerson is a classic but, even though it is true, we don’t put enough effort into encouraging enthusiasm. So, why do I say that enthusiasm is the key to success? There are a two reasons for this. The first is happiness, enthusiastic people are happy. Happiness Happy people are better at creative problem solving. — Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness In positive conditions, mental images appear rapidly, with great variation and…

Most web developers have realized that Javascript is a first-class citizen in web development, but the same is not true of CSS. CSS is still "the wild west" and I believe that this is because CSS falls between the chairs of developers and designers. CSS is also a first-class citizen and it needs as much love as Javascript to avoid becoming a maintenance nightmare. Here are some ideas that I believe are good practices to follow. Use a pre-processing language…

This example assumes that you have a Github account. If you don't have one, you can get one at (suprise!) Github. It also assumes that you have installed Node and npm. It will also simplify your life to have the github gem installed Create the basic structure

OK, now I have an initialized repository and I need something to put in it. I like Readme Driven Development and, in that spirit, let's create a Readme.

`sleep-sort` works by…

During the Software Passion Summit in Gothenburg, I had the privilege to talk to Douglas Crockford, the grandfather of Javascript and the creator of JSON and JSLint While I think that JSLint is an awesome tool, I also think that it is too opinionated and therefore I use JSHint, an alternative that allows me to tweak more of the parameters to fit my style of coding. Douglas think that this is sacrilege, but I disagree. There are two major things…

Git is an amazing version control system that never loses anything, but sometimes it can be hard to find out where things are. Most of the time it is going to be git log that is our friend, but not all the time. Where is my file? Sometimes you know that you have a file in your repository but, you don't know exactly where it is. git ls-files is the answer.

Obviously, you can use any particular grep options…

I’m am looking forward to Øredev 2011 more than I have looked forward to any of the previous ones. The reason for this is that Øredev has finally become a leading conference for dynamic programming. Øredev has always been good in the enterprise sphere led by Java, .Net and mobile tracks, but it has been weaker in the area of dynamic programming languages. Last year was better than before, but this year is going to be great. Here are some…

jQuery is a powerful library and it is possible to get by without using any of the new features. That’s why many of us just upgrade to a new version assuming that it is mostly bug and performance fixes. This is not the case. jQuery 1.4.2 was released in February 2010 and it’s been one and a half years and a number of releases since then. I was going to write about the changes in 1.5 and 1.6, but I…

Another good Ruby book is out, Rails Anti-Patterns. The book is loaded with good tips on everything from following the Law of Demeter to cleaning up your views with the use of helper methods. Here are some things I picked up from the book. delegate can take a :prefix argument The delegate method from active_support is used for delegating calls to another object without having to write out the full delegating methods. It can take a prefix option to customize…

Based on the book Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm, I have developed a strategy for how I should deal with exceptions in Ruby. Being a very dynamic language, Ruby allows very flexible coding techniques. Exceptions are not an exception :). When I am developing a library in Ruby I typically create one Error module and one StdError class. The Error module is a typical tag module and does not contain any methods. Tag Module

The reason for the tag…

Node.js is a set of asynchronous libraries, built on top of the Google V8 Javascript engine. Node is used for server side development in Javascript. Do you feel the rush of the 90′s coming through your head. It is not the revival of LiveWire, Node is a different beast. Node is a single threaded process, focused on doing networking right. Right, in this case, means without blocking I/O. All the libraries built for Node use non-blocking I/O. This is a…

Here is a wonderful story, told by Ken Robinson in his book The Element, about an 8 year old girl, Gillian Lynne, who everyone sees as a problem child. Gillian and her mother went to a psychiatrist and the mother describes her daughter’s difficulties with concentrating, sitting, and doing her homework. The doctor listened to the mother and then he told Gillian that he wanted to talk to her mother alone. When they left the room, the doctor turned on…

More and more browsers have implemented EcmaScript 5. That means that it is time to get up to speed on what it means for us as developers Here is a summary of Douglas Crockfords talk on Ecmascript 5 at Scandev New Syntax It is now possible to use reserved words as property names and in unquoted literal keys. A comma is allowed after the last pair in object literals and after the last element in array literals. It is possible…

Here are some tips on high perfomance Javascript I have picked up. Most of it comes from the books High Performance Javascript by Nicholas C. Zakas and High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders. Loading Load files at the end of the HTML page Load the Javascript files right before the end body tag, this will allow the page to render without having to wait for all the Javascript files. Group files together With normal loading, the files are loaded…

If you are working as a consultant, it is sometimes not easy to get proper network access when you are using your customer’s network. The easiest way to solve this problem is to connect via your mobile phone. But, the 3G network is not always the fastest and it would be nice to use the normal network for certain tasks and the 3G network for others. The problem in my case was that I wanted to connect to Github but,…

I just finished the book, Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley. It’s a great book, but it is a bit wordy (512 pages), so here is the gist of it. Continuous delivery builds on a simple foundation, continuous integration, automation, and version control. But in order to get it to work you must version control and automate everything. It’s that simple! Version control and automate everything! Everything means different things to different people, but to Jez and David…