We did not wake up one morning and find the web changed. We just shipped one more script tag, then another, and one day the browser was our app runtime. notes from my repo 2012 and the Shape of the Frontend: a ground level story of the rise of JavaScript,…
Category: General Software
Industry trends, platform evaluations, migration strategies, and systems thinking. The broader context of software development and technology choices.
Scaffolding Done Right: Start Fast, Keep Clean
Ship today. Regret nothing tomorrow. That is the point of scaffolding when you do it right. Friday night, greenfield, caffeine It is late on a Friday and your inbox is a graveyard. You crack open a fresh repo and type yo angular. Yeoman throws a party of files into your…
Node Appears on Our Backlog: What Changes?
Creation timestamp: 2014-03-17T01:40:37 Dialogue PM: I see a new card on the backlog. It just says Try Node.js. Are we switching stacks or is this a tech crush we are indulging? Me: Neither. It means we stop talking about Node like it is a rumor and we give it a…
Package Managers Change Everything
Years ago I kept a folder named libs on my desktop and dragged random zip files into it. A jQuery plugin from a blog here, a date picker there, a copy of Prototype from a friend’s thumb drive, and good luck remembering where any of it came from. One night…
Graph Thinking with Neo4j: When Relationships Matter
Your data is not just rows and columns. It is people, clicks, events and choices bumping into each other.When those bumps carry meaning, a graph database like Neo4j starts to feel less like a trend and more like the right tool. Graph thinking beats table thinking when relationships carry the…
First Steps with Android: Activities, Intents, Lifecycles
\n KitKat just landed and the Nexus 5 buzz is real. Android Studio is in preview while many of us still ship apps with Eclipse ADT. Tools aside, the first wall new Android folks hit is always the same: what is an Activity, what is an Intent, and why does…
Shipping with HSQLDB: When Embedded Is Enough
When an embedded database is enough for shipping You want to ship. You do not want to babysit a server. For a lot of apps right now the right move is to bundle an embedded database and call it a day. That is where HSQLDB and its cousin H2 shine….
The New Async: Callbacks, Promises, Patterns
JavaScript async is the thing under the hood of every app we ship now. Ajax everywhere, Node on the server, timers, events, the whole party. We glue code to a clock that never stops. If you have felt the pain of a callback pyramid, swallowed an error without noticing, or…
jQuery Selectors that Read Like English
\n Your jQuery can read like English. Let your selectors tell the story. \n\n\n\n Think in sentences when you write jQuery selectors \n\n\n\n We reach for jQuery every day, and with jQuery two landing this spring while many teams still ship on the one ten branch for old IE, selectors…
Stateful Services in a Stateless World
We keep saying the cloud loves stateless apps, then we ship a feature that needs a cart, a profile, a queue, or a ledger, and reality taps us on the shoulder. The truth is every successful product collects baggage, and that baggage is called state. In a world of load…