About half a year ago, I wrote about our experiences living in France for a year. One of the major themes was about the difficulties of learning a new language. At the time, I hypothesized that the best method of language learning I had found was one-on-one Skype based tutoring and that in three months of just using that method, I would be as good at Japanese as I was at French. This hypothesis wa

A quick collection of notes and tips that made my trip to Japan a lot easier. Having just returned from a two week vacation in Japan, I kept some notes on a few small tips that I picked up throughout my trip to make my journey as convenient and foolproof as possible. As someone who is directionally challenged and who had never spoken a word of Japanese before my trip, I knew I was going to need so

This has been hard to write. The original title was “One Year Later.” On January 1st 2014 my friend Luke Arduini jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge to end his own life. In the week before his suicide he made a point to see all of his close friends. Completely unaware of what he was going through he and I drank scotch and talked about his upcoming project. He had already written his suicide note. On

Update: 2020In the years since I wrote this article, a lot has changed. When I wrote it, lots of developers were coming to JavaScript from languages like Java and C++, lacking any understanding of how objects work in JavaScript, and trying to apply obsolete patterns, such as deeply layered inheritance hierarchies. Thanks in part to warnings from influential software developers and framework author

I took a short trip to Barcelona recently, and whilst that is of no significance to this post, it did give me time to relax, reflect AND read a book. One Small Step Can Change Your Life — The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer, Ph.D.The book is called “One Small Step Can Change Your Life — The Kaizen Way” by Robert Maurer, Ph. D. It caught my eye because I’m a strong believer in taking smaller steps to a

A detailed guide on building your very own sound machine using JavaScript, Node.js and Electron The how and what of JavaScript desktop applicationsDesktop applications always had a special place in my heart. Ever since browsers and mobile devices got powerful, there’s been a steady decline of desktop applications which are getting replaced by mobile and web applications. Still, there’s are a lot o

With ES6 finalized in June, it is time to look forward to ES7. There are some awesome proposals that you should get excited about, including: Object.observe, async functions, and the new bind operator (<this>::<fn>). The future of javascript is even more exciting with the announcement of Web Assembly. All this mixed with V8, Node and Tessel, and we are seeing Javascript slowly begin to take over t

Iterators, generators and array comprehensions; The similarities between JavaScript and Python continue to increase over time and I for one could not be more excited. Today we’re going to talk about the next Pythonic proposal for ECMAScript — Decorators, by Yehuda Katz. Update 07/29/17: Decorators are advancing at TC39. The latest work on them can be found in the proposals repo. Several new exampl

Thoughts, tips and tricks from an American living in Paris for a year. When we first moved to Paris, I did a few posts about all the stuff we went through to move here. I thought it would be interesting or helpful to people thinking about doing something similar. Before writing about our experiences again, I wanted to give it some time to sink in and really be able to reflect back on what we’ve be

Many individuals and teams fail at documenting their projects properly, effectively drawing other developers away from their code. Fortunately, the most common documentation pitfalls are quite simple to overcome. In this article, I’m going through techniques that have helped make our projects more approachable to new developers whilst also appealing to power users, eventually bringing more people

On Yahoo’s 20th Anniversary, its CEO presents a progress report on how she’s turning around—and maybe transforming—an Internet icon It is sunset in Sunnyvale, but Marissa Mayer’s day is far from over. She has a keynote presentation at a mobile ad product launch coming up in a day, and the conference room near her corner office on the Yahoo campus shows evidence of careful preparation. Printouts fr

A lot has happened in the few months since io.js was announced. An ambitious release date was set for January 13th, Fedor’s Birthday, and after a lot of hard work from a remarkable number of people we made it with just a few timezones to spare ☺ In addition to the first release there have been 4 patch releases which have been downloaded over 400K times. We’re seeing more contributions than anyone

I once told someone I was an architect. It’s true in a way since I now have to design an intricate web of lies to back it up. On a serious note, I thought it might be salutary to look at the state of application architecture in the JavaScript community as we ebb our way towards 2015. I’ll talk about composition, functional boundaries, modularity, immutable data structures, CSP channels and a few o

Since the initial launch of io.js there has been nearly universal positivity, praise, and excitement about the project and what it means for the future of Node. One concern I’ve seen come up a few times is about “fragmentation.” I put this in quotes because I’m not entirely sure what people mean when they use it and so I’m left to ponder each context they might be referring to in order to respond.