Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- HTML Email

  Cache them if you can

“The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.” I always smile when I hear a web performance speaker say this. I forget who said it first, but I’ve heard it numerous times at conferences and meetups over the past few years. It’s true! Caching is critical for making web pages faster. I’ve written extensively about caching: Call to improve browser caching(lack of) Caching for iPhone Home Screen AppsRedirect caching deep diveMobile cache file sizesImproving app ...

   Cache,HTTP request,Websiite     2012-03-27 12:54:02

  Why programmers work at night

A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code. And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am. At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special a...

   Programmer,Sleep,Later,Efficiency,Habit     2011-12-16 10:13:27

  Using JavaScript to operate clipboard

Browsers allow JavaScript to read and write data on clipboard. Generally script should not modify user's clipboard to avoid impacting user expectation, but there are cases where this can indeed bring convenience to users. For example, for some code snippet, user can copy it to clipboard with one click instead of select and copy manually. There are three options for clipboard operation provided in JavaScript/browser: document.execCommand() Asynchronous Clipboard API copy and paste events This p...

   JAVASCRIPT,CLIPBOARD,NAVIGATOR.CLIPBOARD     2021-01-23 23:23:34

  A Brief Guide to Voice Navigation and the Future of UX Design

Voice devices are now everywhere, whether you like them or not. Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, and Apple's Siri have proved that voice interactions are not from science fiction films but part of our new reality. Just as touch screens, voice interaction with devices will completely revolutionize how we interact with our computers, smartphones, and watches (and even cars and houses) in the coming years. But you might ask yourself, why is it evolving at such a fast speed? Well, there are many ...

   UX DESIGN     2021-11-25 02:24:55

  The Death Of The Spec

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the...

   Specification,Android,Platform,Software design     2011-11-15 08:20:22

  Why I switched from Ruby back to C++

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net. Why I did it Slow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just...

   C++,Ruby,Advantage,Feature     2012-01-09 08:56:21

  The Five Stages of Hosting

As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here. 1. The Monastery You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all t...

   Website hosting,Recommendations,Stages,Advantages     2012-01-30 05:43:42

  Method chaining and lazy evaluation in Ruby

Method chaining has been all the rage lately and every database wrapper or aything else that’s uses queries seems to be doing it. But, how does it work? To figure that out, we’ll write a library that can chain method calls to build up a MongoDB query in this article. Let’s get started! Oh, and don’t worry if you haven’t used MongoDB before, I’m just using it as an example to query on. If you’re using this guide to build a querying library...

   Ruby,Method chaining,Lazy evaluation,Implementation     2011-11-29 08:51:17

  Coder or Clown?

That’s the challenge. Sit down with someone you’ve never met and try to work out if they are a coder or a clown. I don’t mean to insult anyone, of course, and I’m the first to acknowledge the years of training and effort that goes into being a professional clown. But some coders, oh boy. Like the time I interviewed a recent graduate. I’ll call her Ada. Full of sympathy for the novice programmer I started with a gentle warm-up, a soft-ball question to break the ...

   Coder,Clown,State,Profile,Category     2011-08-28 23:04:46

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

RECENT