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  Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, givin...

   Open source,Benefits,Popularity,Advertisement,Advantage     2011-11-23 07:58:15

  Capture screenshot of dropdown menu

As a IT professional, we often need to capture screenshot of what we are working on to give proof of what we are doing and why we do it. The screenshot will provide a good sense to other people. You may be familiar with taking screenshot with different tools such as snagit, snipping tool or the Windows PrtSc button. But do you know how to take a screenshot of a dropdown menu? Here we show you how to capture screeenshot of dropdown menu with the snipping tool provided since Windows 7. Below are t...

   Widnows,Screenshot,Dropdown menu,Capture     2014-11-20 06:20:20

  Writing unit tests for legacy code – an open letter to developers I work with

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-ne...

   Unit testing,Open letter     2012-02-09 05:39:56

  Best practices of front end optimization

1. Use DocumentFragment or innerHTML to replace complex elements insertion DOM operation on browser is expensive. Although browser performance is improved much, multiple DOM elements insertion is still expensive and will affect the page load speed. Assume we have an ul element on our page, we now want to retrieve a JSON list using AJAX and then update the ul using JavaScript. Usually we may write it as : var list = document.querySelector('ul'); ajaxResult.items.forEach(function(item) { // ...

   JavaScript,Front end,Optimization,Tips     2013-07-06 11:26:27

  JavaScript interview questions

This post will cover the JavaScript questions I have encountered and have seen during my programming career. They will mainly focus on vanilla JavaScript though there are lots of excellent frameworks out there and many people are using them in their daily work. this keyword this keyword is an very important but easy to confuse concept in JavaScript since it is always referring to the calling object of the function. 1. What will be the output of below code snippet? function User(name) { this....

   JAVASCRIPT,ALGORITHM,THIS,CLOSURE     2019-03-09 07:05:46

  Mozilla releases a web identity system : Persona

Now almost every website requires the user to register, there are many benefits of registration for a website, such as retaining users, accommodating discussions, providing customized content and so on.But there is too much trouble if each site requires registration, right?Of course, users can also have their own way, for those less important sites, for example, using a unified user name, password and email so that you only need to remember one account. Then, we also see some advanced methods em...

   Mozilla,Persona,Security,ID     2012-09-28 12:02:25

  Samsung will build its own mobile browser

According to the Korean IT News, Samsung is developing its own brand mobile browser based on WebKit, make its the default browser for future Gaxlaxy products.Samsung has posted recruitment advertisements for recruiting Webkit developers in its Advanced Software Platform Lab located in the Silicon Valley. Webkit is an open-source browser engine, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome are based on this open source engine.For many users, the phone's built-in default browser is still the most used, so S...

   Samsung,Browser,Webkit     2012-09-24 22:32:00

  Jackie the smart quadcopter to launch at Robotics Week

Flying security camera synced to smartphone kicks off Kickstarter campaign Entrepreneurs and robotics graduate students Jackie Wu and Ritwik Ummalaneni, in Northwestern University’s Master’s in Robotics program, are launching their new product, Jackie, during the National Robotics Week. The flying security camera quadcopter syncs straight to a smartphone, and is the next evolution in home security platforms that consumers have been waiting for. Jackie’s intuitive and easy co...

   Startup,Quadcopter,Security camera,Jackie Wu     2015-04-05 20:56:11

  JavaScript: Passing by Value or by Reference

In JavaScript, we have functions and we have arguments that we pass into those functions. But how JavaScript handles what you’re passing in is not always clear. When you start getting into object-oriented development, you may find yourself perplexed over why you have access to values sometimes but not other times. When passing in a primitive type variable like a string or a number, the value is passed in by value. This means that any changes to that variable while in the function are com...

   JavaScript,Function,Pass by reference,Pa     2011-07-28 11:05:25

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41