My favorite StackOverflow answer, translated for non-programmers

I found one of my favorite stack overflow answers of all time the other day.

Essentially, a less-skilled developer asked why his RegEx wasn’t parsing his HTML correctly. The answer, in short: Why in the world are you using RegEx to parse HTML? Don’t do that. But the delivery was phenomenal (seriously, go check it out). Continue reading “My favorite StackOverflow answer, translated for non-programmers”

An Explanation of Baseball for the Non-Sports-Inclined

Baseball is a game that was invented in America, known as “America’s Greatest Past-time”. In this game, there are two teams. During each sports interval, both teams get a chance to try to get points, and to try to stop the opposing team from getting points. At the end of 9 intervals (or 18 half-intervals), the team with the most points wins. Continue reading “An Explanation of Baseball for the Non-Sports-Inclined”

Your anonymous functions are bad, and maybe we can fix that.

Using anonymous functions for certain callbacks in JS is an age old practice, but it’s high time we all started doing things a little different

If you’ve worked in javascript more than a handful of times, you’ve probably seen something like this:

[javascript]
$elements.each(function (i, el) {
var $el = $(el);
$el.removeClass(‘mod-no-pointer’).addClass(‘mod-label’);
$el.append($(‘<span class="icon icon-standard img-replace"></span>’));
});
[/javascript]

This is technically valid code, and has been a common practice for some time. the $.each() method EXPECTS a function, so how else are we to do this? It gets even more complicated when we Continue reading “Your anonymous functions are bad, and maybe we can fix that.”

Process Prototyping (a.k.a. the Bromander Method)

As a software engineer, I have found that I must continue to learn new tools and techniques to stay relevant (and engaged) in my field. I’ve had more than my share of dry periods where work seemed boring, until I was brought a challenge… something that I had no idea how to handle, which forced me to learn new methodologies to accomplish the task. These periods of sink-or-swim, grow-or-fall-behind (sometimes lasting months) are undeniably the most exciting periods of my career to date. Continue reading “Process Prototyping (a.k.a. the Bromander Method)”