So you’re still not using HTML5, huh? I guess you probably have your reasons; it’s not fully adopted yet, it doesn’t work in IE, you don’t like users, you’re out of touch or you are just passionately in love with writing strict XHTML code. HTML5 is the revolution that the web needed and the fact is, it is the future whether you like it or not — suck it up and deal. HTML5 isn’t hard to use or understand and even though it’s not fully adopted yet, there are still plenty of reasons to start using it right now — like right after you ge...

We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work. To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide provides details such as how much white space should surround a logo, which typefaces and colours a brand u...

Every time you hit a mobile network, it slows your users down and introduces another point of failure. So when you're designing your application, you need to take advantage of every opportunity to omit needless requests.Parse's philosophy is to help make this easier by providing standard ways to reduce network requests. One example is caching queries, which lets you avoid resending requests you've already sent. Another example, which we've launched in the most recent version of the Parse SDK, is include functionality, inspired by the Ruby on Rails :include option.When you have relation...

This editorial was originally submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald in response to an editorial proclaiming that people wanting to become software engineers should not attend university and instead learn a current popular programming language.  Over the past few years I’ve developed software for large corporations, started the Vodafail campaign, co-founded Mijura and represented Australia in the global Robocup (humanoid robotic soccer) competition. I graduated from University of New South Wales School of Computer Science & Engineering this past year with a Software Engineering...

I spent the last couple of days thinking about Python 3's current state alot. While it might not appear to be the case, I do love Python as alanguage and especially the direction it's heading in. Python has been notonly part of my life for the last couple of five years, it has been thelargest part by far.Let there be a warning upfront: this is a very personal post. I counted ahundred instances of a certain capital letter in this text.That's because I am very grateful for all the opportunities I got over thelast few years to travel the world, to talk to people and to share thespirit that an ...

So what are multimethods? I'll give you my own definition, as I've come to understand them: a function that has multiple versions, distinguished by the type of the arguments. (Some people go beyond this and also allow versions distinguished by the value of the arguments; I'm not addressing this here.)As a very simple example, let's suppose we have a function that we want to define for two ints, two floats, or two strings. Of course, we could define it as follows:def foo(a, b): if isinstance(a, int) and isinstance(b, int): ...code for two ints... elif isinstance(a, float) and is...

A friendly reminder:The problem isn’t you. The problem is the problem. –Steven PressfieldSome stuff is just hard.We start thinking we messed up. That it’s an issue with us. But it’s not. The work is hard and the problem is hard. You need to solve the problem, not fix yourself.The quote above is from Steven Pressfield’s incredible Do the Work. The audiobook (that’s a store link) is about 90 minutes long, so it fits in a single dreary London commute and costs less than lunch.My problem as of lateMy previous businesses have b...

I am quite excited about ECMAScript 6, after watching David Herman’s talk at YUIConf 2011. I am especially looking forward to seeing some of these features landing up on V8 soon, so that I can use it on node.js. These additions will solve many common sources of frustration that newcomers face when working with JavaScript. Although the spec is not expected to be finalized till 2013 (so says David in the video), a lot of these features are expected to hit Chrome and Firefox much before that. I am personally looking forward to the following: let keyword The let keyword has a block scope. ...