This year has been filled with wonderful events, some were expected, while others, wholly unthinkable in early January, have also became reality. One of the more pleasant surprises came in February, when I received a special delivery from Losant (then Structure), a software-as-a-service platform that empowers developers to easily create powerful, reactive, connected applications that can be run on small devices and embedded into our lives.
For years, I’ve heard rumblings of misogyny, sexual misconduct, and other troubling events in the Ruby community. Female friends have discussed their stories with me at length: some are concerned (but still participate), while others have left the community altogether.
While Twitter, for many individuals, has taken the place of blogging — instead, for me, it’s the place where ideas are fostered and allowed to grow before expanding into fully formed pieces of prose.
I bought a MacBook in 2006. The white, polycarbonate-clad machine was my first serious laptop. It was far superior to the family PCs in every way. I was excited about the purchase, yes, but I also understood that it was a tool.
Knowledge is the most important tool that any developer can possess. With the explosion of platforms like CodeSchool, PluralSight, and many others, the cost of education is plummeting.
What is your first thoughts in reaction to the term “mechanical keyboard”? Nostalgia? The obnoxious “clicky” sound you hoped to leave behind? If you’re relatively young, you may have no recollection of this product at all.
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Chicago Node.js meetup about our technology stack for The Machine. I’ve only been working with Node.js for a couple of months, but in that time, I’ve learned many difficult lessons.
One of the major challenges I’ve had to overcome with Node.js is a task that’s relatively simple in Ruby. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult, but serializing JSON can be frustrating, even though you’re working entirely in JavaScript.
In a previous life, I was a professional web developer. I’ve used JavaScript extensively throughout my career, but I always saw it as the necessary evil: a weird little language that existed solely to provide interactive features in your web browser.