Hopeful Hacker

While thinking about Walking In Space, I was motivated by how teams worked and communicated. But I am a developer and in the back of every developers mind is the thought “If only I could just do it all myself, it would be so much easier”. At first blush, this is an impractical and unlikely hypothesis. Most useful and comprehensive solutions are the result of teams, not individuals. But after turning it over a bit, I thought that it might be a good place to start. ...

I have been playing with a simple way to visualise progress and efficiency when we are creating solutions. I think could be useful, tell me what you think. When I came up with this method, I was a little frustrated. My team was doing a lot of work but making only modest progress. We hadn’t spent enough time on prototyping so our stack was slowing us down. We were using discovery to figure out how features would look but this meant a lot of re-work. ...

Adventures with Unity3d Web Player and socket.io I am currently building a multi-player game with Unity3d, ES6 and socket.io. I had a LOT of challenges getting this all to work, in particular I had problems with the Unity web player’s security sandbox approach and included libraries. I’m dumping my pain and learnings into this article both for my own reference and hopefully to help some folks out there who wish to pursue a similar approach and have similar challenges ...

Debugging is Evil Debugging is evil. Debugging is not coding. Coding is a creative flow. Coding is bringing together objects and methods and classes to represent and solve problems for your users. Coding adds value, solving problems for your users is useful. Debugging is not coding. Debugging is an analytical process. Debugging adds no value in and of itself. The very best you can do with debugging is to get it over quickly so you can realise the value that you already added when you were coding. ...

What is it for? I am building a simple restful API using Express over MongoDB in order to support a mobile application. Even though the endpoint was quite straightforward, I wanted to ensure it is properly tested. In creating this test, I wanted to fulfill some simple objectives Integration style test - completely independent of the implementation Setup and Teardown of the database. Fast, simple, as little complexity as possible What Am I Testing? ...

Software exists to solve problems for people. Software frameworks exist to solve problems with developing software. Reflecting on the hype and excitement around React, I thought it was a good time to think about the key problem solved by the AngularJS 1.x framework and contrast that with the React framework. Web design and coding are different HTML and CSS are fundamentally about visual layout, look and feel. To be good at these, you need a sense of design and a lot of patience. ...

So I am tired of looking at reading otherwise reasonable articles on angular.js or atom.io and finding myself bamboozled by this crazy ruby-esque nonsense that is coffeescript. Time to learn. My train ride home is about 90 minutes. that should be enough. Lets go 8:19 - start (http://jashkenas.github.io/coffee-script/) Installation Michaels-MacBook-Pro:learn_cs michael$ npm install -g coffee-script npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/coffee-script npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/coffee-script npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/mkdirp npm http 200 https://registry. ...

Being myself in the throes of re-learning Java, Maven and IntelliJ (don’t ask) I found this article resonated a lot with me… http://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ In particular, this statement..  If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. This is 100% me. I study, understand and then do nothing and all the good learning evaporates away. I will come back to the topic much too late and have to start from scratch again. ...

I’m busy working on a curriculum for my favourite front end Javascript framework AngularJS. To really understand it, I have been stepping through and reading the AngularJS Source. This codebase is awesome! well written and well documented. Over and above understanding AngularJS, this is what I have learned along the way. 1) Doing more things faster with for I have always just used for for the basic pro-forma like this:- ...

Through using and explaining BDD, I have become convinced that there are 3 main facets to the BDD approach. Understanding the incremental benefit and cost of these facets is key to guiding you on your BDD journey. 1) A common vocabulary for describing behaviours Using the ‘Given, When, Then’ pro-forma for describing behaviour is the first, easiest to introduce and IMO, most important aspect of the BDD approach. It is easy to get across to people without resistance because it is so simple, almost trivial. ...