Coordinating software development with CruiseControl I ordinarily don’t write about my client work here, but since it pertains to good software engineering practices in general, I wanted to publish this article here on my main blog. I initially titled this post “Continuous integration with CruiseControl”, but what I’m describing isn’t full-fledged CI , although it incorporates many of its tenets.…

Observations about Javascript performance I just posted my js1k entry, and while I was doing the final rain dance of getting things down to 1024 bytes and testing in all of the major browsers (with the notable exception of IE) I noticed a few things about performance in the different browsers. 1) Javascript object allocation in Firefox is slower than…

Javascript minimization I recently had to cram nearly 3k of Javascript code down into 1024 bytes for submission to the js1k competition. Initially I didn’t think that I’d get there, but I did. Once I stripped out all comments and log statements I still had over 2k of code. Here are a few things that helped me out: 1) Run…

Making rich text possible on mobile devices This post is an overview of the techniques used in a rich text editor for mobile devices that I’m working on called Richie . I’m focusing on the iPhone first, followed by the iPad and other devices. As mobile devices evolve and increase in popularity I think we’ll be doing more of the…

Updated: Jath Javascript XML processor I just pushed some updates to the Jath template-based XML processor. The new version adds support for including literal values in the templates and most importantly (for me, right now) support for processing files under Windows Script Host. I’m going to be using this to churn through tons of exported CRM config data soon, so…

Increase project velocity, decrease cost of change I’ve been thinking a bit lately about project management topics and how they relate to customer expectations. I realize that this is quite a broad topic sentence, and I’m only going to dive into a few very specific things here, but hopefully I can keep expanding these ideas in a series of posts.…

Release small I just read a post by Tom Preston-Werner entitled ‘Readme-Driven Development’. This reminds me of some thoughts that I wanted to blog about. I’ve had a few projects that I thought would be pretty simple to do but turned out to be a little more complicated than expected. Rather than hunker down and churn through the whole hairy…

Javascript as a data manipulation language If you are like me you’ve been working with data in various forms for your whole programming career. Sometimes we have big datasets locked away in relational databases or complex content management systems. Other times we’re dealing with ad-hoc data from spreadsheets or web portals. Ironically it can be the larger data that are…

In defense of the Storarray I just ran across an old DailyWTF article again, courtesy of Hacker News. I’m pretty sure that I read the article when it first ran in 2006 when I was working for a government contractor. Back then I used to devour DailyWTF, Slacker Manager, Lifehacker and a raft of other blogs through Google Reader. It…

Transforming JSON to XML using Mustache I had the need recently to take a deeply-nested JSON structure and transform it to a relatively flat XML file. Ideally I wanted the equivalent of XPath for JSON, where I could have flattened a nested structure like this: [ { name: form1, fields: [ ... ] }, { name: form1, fields: [ ...…