Surviving the summer in Madrid
July 16, 2013I’m spending the summer in Madrid at the moment. It’s a great place to work on Readlang. It keeps me in language learning mode, and it’s way cheaper to live than my old home of London, which is handy when trying to bootstrap a business. The one problem is the heat, my friends back in the UK are complaining about the 30 degree heat wave there at the moment, well that’s nothing compared to the 42 degrees (that’s “fourty-two” in case you suspected a typo) it reaches here in Madrid.
Oh, and we don’t have air conditioning.
Go to your email
May 13, 2013Busuu noticed that I have a gmail address and presented a “Go to your email” link taking me straight to gmail. It’s a nice touch.
Pity about the dodgy CSS in the spam folder message though.
Surprise Visitors
April 1, 2013Wow, woke up this morning to see this at my readlang.com Google Analytics:
Wait a minute… just noticed the date :-)
Essential Javascript Libraries
March 8, 2013These libraries share an ‘almost perfect’ quality of being compact, well designed, and I wouldn’t start a large project without them.
-
jQuery The DOM manipulation library.
-
Underscore.js Just a clean set of functions for manipulating Arrays, Objects and some other general things that feel like an extension of the language. The kind of stuff you need do all the time. It’s amazing how much more compact and readable your code gets once you get used to using functions like _.pluck(), _.filter(), _.defaults(), _.extend(), _.pick(), I could go on…
-
Async.js Like underscore it’s very simple, but this one is focussed on cleaning up asynchronous program flow.
-
Backbone.js Compact library for models, views, syncing to a REST API, and routing. Stuff that almost any web page needs and done with a very lightweight implementation.
-
RequireJS Probably not as neat as the other four, but dependency management that works in the browser and nodejs, supports different directory structures, code which wasn’t written as an AMD module, and all sorts of other configurations is bound to get a little messy. (e.g currently the recommended way to use it with jQuery is to use the combined require-jquery.js file, hmmm) Anyway, once set up this handles everything elegantly making large projects managable, and the r.js optimiser makes deployment super simple.
First Year In Web Development
March 7, 2013It’s been close to a year now since I made the switch from desktop to web development, and there’s no turning back! Here’s some thoughts.