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Lessons from a Pure JavaScript Project: CoffeeScript

This is the second post in a series on observations and questions from implementing a single page pure JavaScript web application for a recent project. For background and the other posts in this series, see the introduction

Before joining this project I spent two weeks on another project helping them make a technology decision. This other [...]

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Lessons from a Pure JavaScript Project

Our team is wrapping up the first release of a pure JavaScript, single page web application. No one on the team has ever built one of these before and it seems they are becoming the new hotness, so I thought it would be useful to attempt to write down some observations and questions. Hopefully, you [...]

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Illinois, Texas, Cali and Accents

Inspired by some of my friends and family who have also moved overseas this year, it is time to start writing about living in the US.

The first week and a half was Chicago. A couple of days of thrilling things like opening a bank account and applying for my social security number. Banks are different [...]

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Steve.

As everyone knows by now, Steve Jobs died last Wednesday, 5th of October. I first found about it while browsing twitter, sitting in the departure lounge of San Francisco International airport. I think my tweets from then tell the story.

5:59pm: Fuck. 6:00pm: 

I started programming for the Apple //e back in 1986, when I was seven. [...]

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A modest proposal towards reusable step definitions for Cucumber

While the title is a nod to the original modest proposal this is completely serious. I just liked the title. Pez thought I should be more clear.

Typically, cucumber step definitions look like this:

When /^I select the recipient named “([^"]*)”$/ do |recipientname| within_jqm_page do page.find(’a', :text => recipientname).click end end

Step definitions implemented like this end [...]

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Better Line Numbering in emacs

Earlier this year while pairing with Julio Maia, an unashamed vim user, I noticed that the line numbers didn’t count from the top of the file in his editor. Instead, all line numbering was relative to his current line. It looked something like this.

This was really cool. It’s really easy to navigate and edit when [...]

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The Problems with Time

As all programmers know, there are serious problems with the way our society has chosen to divide up time. As an example, right now it is 9:44pm on Monday, 21 March 2011. Quick, what is the date and time in one month, five days, eight hours, 23 minutes and 45 seconds.

I’m sure you’ve all worked [...]

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M&Ms

“Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.” I am certain that is older than 2007. But thanks to the Internet Event Horizon, that’s where Google tells me it is from. Does anyone out there know where this originated?

There should be credit where credit is due.

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Patterns for Bundler and rvm

A couple of long standing problems in the world of Ruby have been dealing with all the gems that are so easy to toss into your project and the differences between Ruby implementations. They do differ: between 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 standard library APIs changed. Slow clap.

In the world of adults the solution to these problems [...]

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Why WikiLeaks Matters

Much, but refreshingly not all, of the arguments about WikiLeaks have focussed on whether or not WikiLeaks was right to leak those diplomatic cables. Do governments have the right to private conversations? Individuals do, so why not governments? And if governments do, then what about corporations? Well, I believe all those arguments are missing the [...]

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