There's an old adage that goes something like: 'Do not talk about religion or politics'.  Why?  Because these subjects are full of strong opinions but are thin on objective answers.   One person's certainty is another person's skepticism; someone else's common sense just appears as an a prior bias to those who see matters differently.  Sadly,  conversing these controversial subjects can generate more heat than light.   All too often people can get so wound up that they forget that the outcome of their "discussion" has no bearing on their life expectancy,...

Since the latest episodes of both Bent and Throw it Against the Wall have seen me mention Windows Phone 7, I think it’s about time I talk about why I like it. I know there’s a lot of scepticism surrounding it. And why not? Most people I know who were considering jumping the Microsoft ship did so in the dark days of Vista, so that’s their last experience with Windows. Anyone who saw their parents working on a Treo back in the nascent days of the Blackberry know the sloppy, malfunctioning horror that was Windows Mobile 6.5.There’s a messy pedigree there. And with tech...

Donald Knuth cleverly imprisoned the phrase "Literate Programming" - if you're not documenting your source with his particular methodology then you must be a proponent of "Illiterate Programming," which sounds truly awful.I very much believe in documented code but I think no amount of pontification in English will ever make a piece of code clearer than the code itself (I'm not talking about project or API documentation). I'm also not talking about the superficial notions / arguments of "readability" that are bandied about these days (Python, CoffeeScript, etc).Mos...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been interviewing with Google for a job doing primarily JavaScript development. I didn’t end up getting the job but I thought I would share the process of interviewing for Google as it was both very exciting and a humbling experience. I can’t reveal everything as I’m under a few NDAs. I’m not going to mention the products or teams that I was interviewing for but you may be able to guess.For those that don’t know me, I’m an independent developer/designer. A majority of my work falls into the four categories of JavaSc...

I recently started working on a few Node.js applications. Coming most recently from PHP (and Drupal in particular), I found the transition to Node.js to be surprisingly easy. Pleasurable, in fact. But I had to learn to think differently about a few things.Below I list the five things I think every PHP developer should know about Node.js.1. Node.js Is Built On Chrome's JavaScript EngineGoogle's browser, Chrome, has a notoriously fast JavaScript engine called V8. And this JavaScript engine can be cleanly separated from the web browser. Node.js is built on V8. This is one of the main reasons why ...

This is an email I sent today to developers who work with me, it is exactly as I wrote it except for project and developer names which I’ve redacted.Dear Developers,S asked me a difficult question today, and I think the answer (which took me a few minutes to arrive at) is worth sharing with all developers, mainly because many of you will surely face the exact same problem especially in [maintenance and enhancement] projects.By now I think it is crystal clear that one of our non-negotiable requirements for coding is that we write unit tests.For new projects it is easy – in fact fo...

IntroductionWhy a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 saw the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer.It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, an engineer at Netscape, and first released with Netscape 2 early in 1996. It was orig...

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine thing and may arrive in Go one day, or may not) but about imagination, or at least what passes for imagina...