A Permanent Wreck

I work for a decent sized manufacturing company in the Pittsburgh area. I am the only ruby developer. We have another developer on staff, but our responsibilities don’t usually overlap and he doesn’t know ruby. After joining this company, I was eventually tasked with writing web apps. Now, my background is Computer Engineering and I spent a considerable time learning lower level programming, C/C and even Assembly. I thought it would be fun to learn, so I got some books and got to work.

My talk covered how to build big, scalable front-ends and one of the key factors involved in doing so is sensible and generous use of abstracted classes. One thing that really helps you achieve this is the application of the single responsibility principle, a method used mainly in OO programming.

When coding CSS, one of the best ways to ensure your code runs smoothly on older browsers and slow computers is to write your CSS efficiently for browser rendering, this way your site takes less resource and memory from the user’s computer and therefore runs smoother.

It may be that from the ashes of vendor prefixes will arise a new way forward. As proposed by François Remy, vendor tokens would serve the same basic purpose as prefixes with a different syntactical approach, and with at east a couple of extra benefits. Instead of prefixing properties, you’d instead add vendor tokens to the end of a single declaration, much as you do !important (which of course we never ever use, amirite?).

I’m not sure where or when it happened, but at some point the JavaScript community decided that multiple, individual var statements were superfluous, instead opting for a single, combined var statement with a comma-separated list of variable declarations and assignments whenever possible.

Most address fields on web forms ask for city, state, and zip code (or city and post code, outside of the US). But as us nerds often lament, city and state are redundant with zip code. Or at least they can be inferred from a correctly entered zip code. That’s the kind of thing computers are good at. What we need is a proper API to cough up that information for us on demand.

As much as I like .net magazine, I was recently outraged by their “Texturizing Web Type” article. It features a way to apply a texture to text with -webkit-mask-image, presenting it as an experimental CSS property and misleading readers. There are even -moz-, -o- and -ms- prefixes for something that is not present in any specification, and is therefore unlikely to ever be supported by any non-WebKit browser, which further contributes to the misdirection. A while back, I wrote about how detrimental to our work and industry such proprietary features can be.

Today we’re going to explore JavaScript style guides, specifically: their importance, style guides worth reviewing and tools that can assist in automated code beautification or style enforcement.

I adjusted what I did with my time, I changed the people I hung out with, I did things that were WAY out of my comfort zone, I went to the other side of the world, I gathered the best and brightest people I could find, I had those people invest in my company, I convinced Finn – an awesome go-getter – to join my company. I’m interviewing Richard Branson next week and I’m speaking at an entrepreneurship event to university students in my country tomorrow, while I never even graduated college. And it doesn’t even feel like a big achievement right now. I just did it, but it wasn’t that hard. I just did it.

CSS has an underlying design and when you work with it, with the natural flow of how CSS is meant to be used, you will find you have a lot less bugs. I learned CSS by reading the W3C specifications, which is why I began coding according to the language’s design, but however you learned it, you can pick up some of the key points involved.

Closures are often viewed as an arcane art in the land of JavaScript. Once mastered, they allow you to write some truly amazing JavaScript. This article will get you up to speed on the magic of JavaScript closures.