We recently wrote that a website, web app, or any other kind of software is best thought of as an investment in your business. Because it’s an investment, it’s best not to think in terms of simply driving the cost down to zero — as you would if it were simply a cost center for […]
Refactoring, they say, is vital to maintaining a healthy code base. We all know we should do it, but many of us don’t. Exercise, they say, is vital to living a long and healthy life. We all know we’ve got to do it, but many of us don’t. Maybe we dabble from time to time, […]
“Big ball of mud” is one of the more common pejoratives thrown at “legacy” code. Systems suffering from a wide variety of different problems get tarred with the brush of “mud,” but generally the overall experience of a developer facing a big ball of mud is one of constant low-grade terror. A sense that everything […]
Conditionals are, if we’re honest, an embarrassingly large part of most programs deployed in the world. I say “embarrassingly” because a two-year-old understands conditionals, and we as developers often fancy ourselves creators of vast systems of profound, innate, and valuable complexity. Sometimes our use of conditionals is just for making a series of little form […]
This past weekend, I refactored a little bit of jQuery for a WordPress plugin I’d written, open-sourced, and released a few years ago. It wasn’t a particularly good bit of jQuery to start, but it worked. In refactoring it, I made sure my script told a clear English-language story about what it was doing. And […]
One of the hardest things to accept, as a justice-loving maker of software, is that a perfectly engineered and beautifully designed piece of software can go completely unused. Similarly, a lot of the software on which the world relies a great deal can be terrible — riddled with poor design decisions if not outright and undeniable […]
In almost any object-oriented programming system, you’ll sometimes have an object whose properties can be composed into more meaningful units of data about that object. For example, an address that you might use to send an envelope of papers consists of a number of properties — a street address, a city, a state, and maybe […]
There are a lot of different aspects of Ember, the JavaScript “framework for creating ambitious web applications,” that you’ll need to understand before you really feel a sense of mastery. But the most fundamental and useful by far is to get the basic understanding of the shape of an app. They have a few core units […]
I was recently having a conversation about how computers work. And it was in the course of that conversations that I understood quite how ignorant I’d been my whole life about the real fundamental elements of computation. I don’t think there’s a ton to be gained from writing an article on a programming site all […]
I recently was presented with a completely greenfield project. We were making a not-uncommon CRUD (create-read-update-delete) app for a business that was looking to move beyond the constraints of their Microsoft Excel-based data-tracking system. We also had a limited but important numbers of use cases where data from all over (what was Excel sheets) would […]
It’s easy to think about programming as an exercise of computers, or of languages and design. But at its heart programming is just about people. I bring this up because it’s so easy to lose sight of the fact that people are who you’re really programming for, and I just need a reminder sometimes. Maybe […]
I was pair programming recently, and I had a bit of revelation: programming is just storytelling. I was “leading” at the time, the more experienced of us in the problem space we were in, and my partner seemed to need the most help seeing how all the little bits fit together into a coherent and […]
