The Insider News

AC[^]:

Yes, Javascript can be surprisingly elegant yet completely infuriating, and all on the same line of code; for a long time, it remained the joke of the programming community, the deranged cousin that outuglied even the likes of PHP and Perl. Nowadays, JS is the language in the spotlight. Here’s my attempt to collate exactly why I like working with Javascript.

Nathan's University[^]:

In this class you will learn how to use the principles of programming language design to implement your own working programming language in JavaScript. You'll be able to show off the finished product to your friends and prospective employers on a simple demo webpage.

Phil Trelford[^]:

This kind of problem can be expressed very concisely in functional programming languages to the point where the code fits in a tweet. Here are some examples in a number of popular functional languages.

DZone[^]:

Code commenting and formatting are all about code understandability. Code understandability is very relevant to code maintainability. So, small details about programming may help maintainability. This is a contentious subject, however.

Greg Young[^]:

I have a feedback cycle more than a few seconds I have already hit ctrl+right arrow and am reading my email or sitting in twitter. This however has a very serious affect on my work. I am constantly pushing and popping my mental stack of what was going on. Let's look at some ways we can make our build times faster. There are loads of ways aside from buying SSDs.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's safe to say that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing; it's the platform on which some of the Internet's most popular sites and services are built. But just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

Jef Claes[^]:

I have been experimenting with the HTML5 offline application cache some more over the last few days, doing boundary tests in an attempt to learn more about browser behaviour in edge cases. One of these experiments was testing the cache quota. Here's what I found.

NYTimes.com[^]:

When it comes to cheating, chess might seem all but invulnerable. After all, the board and its pieces are out in the open for all to see. But an eruption of recent scandals has made it clear that cheating — fueled by powerful computer programs that play better than people do, as well as sophisticated communication technologies — is becoming a big problem for world championship chess.

Making the Complex Simple[^]:

The next time you consider creating a cancel button, I suggest you think of it as a commitment. In my world the cancel button has two promises. Are you ready to keep them?

219 bytes tron[^]:

With some coworkers, we challenged each other to write the smallest possible game of Tron in JavaScript (an exercice known as JavaScript golfing). This page explains our final version (219 bytes).

Jayway[^]:

In Javascript, and other C-like programs, there are only two valid cases for using braces. It is when I am declaring objects and functions (and in other C derivates: classes). So what does this mean in practice?

Rachel Appel[^]:

ASP.NET developers have to think carefully about more than business requirements. The environment, team, tools, deployment, performance, security, and other factors weigh in when it comes to building robust Web applications. When thinking about using ASP.NET on Azure, you or your team might wonder what challenges an ASP.NET deployment on Azure will entail. Let's take a look at some of the common concerns.

DZone[^]:

In JavaScript, all numbers are floating point numbers, encoded in double precision according to the IEEE 754 standard for floating point arithmetic. That standard handles the sign in a manner similar to sign-and-magnitude encoding for integers and therefore also has a signed zero. Whenever you represent a number digitally, it can become so small that it is indistinguishable from 0, because the encoding is not precise enough to represent the difference.

RR's Random Ramblings[^]:

While delivering a training recently, I got a request to put together a JVM tuning cheat sheet. Given the 50+ parameters available on the Sun hotspot, this request is understandable. I’ve tried to narrow down the most important flags that will solve 80% of JVM performance needs with 20% of the tuning effort.

Sam Saffron[^]:

While preparing for my talk at Codemania I started filling my slides with links, clearly not something that scales. So, instead, here is a big list of interesting tools and resources that can help you journey through the murky waters of web performance.

PCWorld[^]:

Windows 8‘s Metro interface may be controversial, but it looks like few PC users will complain about the new operating system’s performance. The PCWorld Labs put the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 through a battery of tests and found it generally faster - sometimes a lot faster - than Windows 7.

Technology Review[^]:

The thing that is often overlooked about diversity is that teams composed of something other than a cognitive monoculture often have a competitive edge over their less-diverse counterparts. Take, for example, gender in tech companies.