That pesky bug I want to talk for a minute about that annoying bug. That one that doesn’t crash the app but makes it do something annoying. That bug that for some reason, has some dependency on the way that the app was designed early on, so the simple fixes break something else in the app. How did this happen?…

We’re witnessing Internet history today With the mass Web site blackouts protesting SOPA today, I think we’re seeing a real watershed moment for lobbying and activism on the Web. I’ve been a part of various Hacktivism movements and campaigns in the past, but I always knew that these fights were localized and very much under the radar of most people.…

The state of Javascript documentation on the Web I just wanted to show an example of a Google search that I did on a common Javascript topic. I’ve written about JS documentation on the Web in the past, but I didn’t have too many specifics in that post. I’ve linked to the PromoteJS movement, trying to get Mozilla docs to…

Hack the Web your way with userjs Few people realize how much their experiences on the web can be tweaked. Sure some savvy users can change the default font size and maybe block ads with an extension. However, the fact that the front-end code of any Web site or application is executed right in the browser makes it possible to…

JS documentation is still sort of a ghetto – promote JS Way back in 2006 when I started working on Ubernote, there were basically three different places that I went to for documentation on Javascript in the browser – MSDN, MDN, and w3schools. Microsoft MSDN actually was pretty good back then, but now I don’t care about IE so much.…

Basics of CSS 3D transforms CSS is getting more and more powerful these days, and now that CSS3 supports 3D transforms, we can do quite a lot without resorting to WebGL or some complex 3D drawing library. However, visualizing how 3D works in CSS can still be tricky, and it isn’t as flexible or rigorous as something like OpenGL. I’ve…

Static method patterns When programming with statically-typed OO languages we all have the temptation sooner or later to implement some functionality using static methods. Static methods are “class” methods, which are called on the data types themselves rather than on an instance of a class. In Microsoft .NET, Static methods are shared among all code that exists within a given…

When to write a library I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. There have been a lot of instances in my work where the debate comes up about when to start abstracting code. There inevitably comes a time where a bit of code gets copied and tweaked enough times that it screams out to be put into…

Full-stack programming case study There has been a lot of talk about “full-stack” programmers in the tech press recently. Along with the concept of “devops” this is an important distinction to make between pure coders and people who are capable of systems thinking. Generally speaking, in addition to a deep understanding of their core programming skills, they understand other parts…

Why compiled regular expressions are awesome I was doing a little code spelunking recently and found this gem of a macro in the University of Washington IMAP server code. It does some validation of various date formats in email headers. The code was written this way for performance, but I wonder if regexps in modern languages would be up to…