I've found the following rules over the years developing, teaching and implementing JavaScript in an unobtrusive manner. They have specifically been the outline of a workshop on unobtrusive JavaScript for the Paris Web conference 2007 in Paris, France. I hope that they help you understand a bit why it is a good idea to plan and execute your JavaScript in this way. It has helped me deliver products faster, with much higher quality and a lot easier maintenance. 1. Do not make any assumptions (JavaScript, the unreliable helper) Probably the most impo...

Introduction      Kernighan and Plauger'sThe Elements of Programming Stylewas an important and rightly influential book.  Butsometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbookapproach to good style instead of the succinct expression ofa philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims thatvariable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't itthen follow that variables whose names are small essays ontheir use are even better?  Isn't MaximumValueUntilOverflow a better name than maxval?  I don't think so.      What follows is a set...

Coding is sort of like a superpower; with it you can create things that millions of people see. You can change the way people behave, the way they think, and the way they interact with others. This is beyond awesome, but I’ve also met a lot of people that think that this ability is inaccessible to them. I’ve met a lot of “non-technical” people who seem to think that this superpower is only bestowed on those fortunate enough to have it come easily to them at a very early age.I took two Computer Science courses in high school, and I’m fairly confident that had it...

I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially after I built YouTube Instant. So, here’s the answer, once and for all, for those who are interested.In short:I learned how to program by building lots of websites.The full story:I learned how to program by working on lots of different website projects starting from a pretty young age. What follows is a full account of all the major websites I’ve built, back to the very first site I made when I was 11 years old. What I hope the reader takes away from this full retelling is the importance of doing lots of side...

IntroductionHTML5 has been a really hot topic in web development. With the support of most modern browsers available (Safari, chrome, firefox, IE10 and mobile devices), even though the specification has not fully completed yet, but many people have already adopted it as the main technology for all the web development projects. Online giant websites such as Google, facebook, twitter and youtube, they are all built in HTML5!For me, the most exciting features of HTML5 are the canvas and the robust form capabilities. Canvas experiment can be seen all over the places (not IE, better with Chrome) bu...

Chances are good that, at some time in your life, you've taken a time-management class, read about it in books, and tried to use an electronic or paper-based day planner to organize, prioritize and schedule your day. "Why, with this knowledge and these gadgets," you may ask, "do I still feel like I can't get everything done I need to?"The answer is simple. Everything you ever learned about managing time is a complete waste of time because it doesn't work.Before you can even begin to manage time, you must learn what time is. A dictionary defines time as "the point or period at which things occu...

I believe that making a game is part art and part science, so it's no wonder that managing a game project is also part art and part science. Clearly if it was all science then the industry would get a collective F for not having made any significant progress over the last decade - all one has to do is just glance at the published postmortems to see that the same patterns are repeated over and over.A game has to be fun, engaging, grab users in the first two minutes and also keep their attention for countless more hours. These requirements place a very difficult burden onto design dire...

I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here are a few points off the top of my head:Work with other developers. We are at a wonderful time in the history of technology when for the first time, it doesn’t really matter where you are or who you are working for. So long as you have a decent internet connection, you can pair up with another developer anywhere in the world and work...