A while back I stumbled upon a great post by Jean-Baptiste Queru. It describes the incredible depth of the modern technology stack. Layers upon layers of complex science, hardware, and software, each layer creating a simpler abstraction around the previous. This ultimately enables our paltry human brains to create amazing things that would otherwise be impossible (or really difficult). This is, in my opinion, the lifeblood of modern software development.For some reason, however, when it comes to front-end web development – meaning javascript – the stack is extremely shallow. Most...

One of the joys of programming is that no matter how simple a problem may seem there are always tons of ways to solve it. It can be good practice to go back and revisit fundamentals by solving simple problems with as many implementations as you can think of. In this post we'll explore approaches to basic iteration in JavaScript.This style of exercise is a good interviewing technique, too, because it's open ended and leads to good discussions. The focus isn't a tricky, wacky problem you're seeing for the first time ever, but bread and butter programming awareness, command, and comfort. It's a g...

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, weâ€...

During some interesting discussions on Twitter yesterday I found that there is now more than ever a confusion about JavaScript dependence in web applications and web sites. This is a never ending story but it seems to me to flare up ever time our browsing technology leaps forward. I encountered this for the first time back in the days of DHTML. We pushed browsers to their limits with our lovely animated menus and 3D logos (something we of course learned not to do again, right?) and we were grumpy when people told us that there are environments out there where JavaScript isn’t available....

Since its birth in 1994, Javascript has come a long way. Today it’s one of the most popular programming languages on the web because of high popularity of AJAX based web-applications. Also the rise of micro-frameworks such as jQuery (also Prototype, Moo Tools etc) which have reduced dramatically the complexity of code developers needed to write, it is well tested, has a ton of plug-ins, has a large development community and reduced development time.And lately even Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS) like Node.js which allows you to create high performance, real-time web applica...

The Analogies Are WrongOriginally, web pages were static documents, and web browsers were static document viewers; there was text, some formatting, and images—if you could pay for the bandwidth to serve them. Hyperlinks were the really big thing, because they were the main point of user interaction—but what a powerful thing they were, and still are.Then along came CGI and Java, and the web was transformed: all of a sudden, a web browser became a way to serve interactive content to users. A web page was no longer just a document, but a portal to a living, breathing world. You your...

As the list of *-as-a-service’s continues to grow, I thought I’d throw one into the mix. What about the idea of a backend-as-a-service (BaaS)?The recent surge of client side Javascript frameworks along with the attractiveness of simple RESTful APIs has created an environment where server-side interaction can be reduced to simply database interaction (including validation and some computation). But why stop there?What if the server-side of the equation was simply a RESTful, schema-less API? It could utilize MongoDB or some other document-oriented storage to avoid a strict schema d...

Did you know that inserting 2^16 = 65536 specially crafted values into a normal PHP array can take 30 seconds? Normally this would take only 0.01 seconds.This is the code to reproduce it:<?php echo '<pre>';$size = pow(2, 16); // 16 is just an example, could also be 15 or 17$startTime = microtime(true);$array = array();for ($key = 0, $maxKey = ($size - 1) * $size; $key <= $maxKey; $key += $size) { $array[$key] = 0;}$endTime = microtime(true);echo 'Inserting ', $size, ' evil elements took ', $endTime - $startTime, ' seconds', "\n";$startTime = microtime(true);$array = arra...