Software As She’s Developed

Minor Update (May 18, 2005): Hyphenated long variable name, it was causing havoc with Wordpress alignment. Joel Spolsky explains that wrong code should be constrained to look wrong. I like this idea … arrange things so that any evil code has a look of outright guilt. Joel focuses on naming conventions, but also lists several other […]

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Tabbing is a simple mechanism, popularised by Amazon in the late 90s, for websites to support navigation. Wikipedia (or any mediawiki-powered site) uses a tab metaphor to break down a page into Article, Discussion, Edit This Page, History. Which is more useful than other wikis that place these links in random and exciting places. However, the […]

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I’ve been putting together some AJAX design patterns. Update (May 15, 2005): I’ve set up AJAXPatterns.org to keep working on these patterns. I’ve also cleaned up a couple of things here, although all future changes will occur at ajaxpatterns. Thanks to Leoglas for spotting two errors here. Why AJAX Design Patterns? AJAX holds a lot of promise for […]

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Not your grandfather’s Javascript … looks like Nicholas Zakas’s Professional JavaScript for Web Developers is now out. This is great news, as the book’s editor - Jim - noted that there’s an AJAX chapter in there. Well, he, qualifies, “OK, not exactly. What he wrote for that book is chapter 16 “Client-Server Communication” (see the […]

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I just discovered James Shore’s blog. Lots of interesting stuff around agile development. In particular, his post, “Down With Comments”. It refers to a recent slashdot article on comments in code: Comments are More Important than Code. As a guy who’s keen on self-documenting software, I have to say that’s a rather provocative title. Interesting, too, that […]

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The 2nd edition of Extreme Programming Explained has been out for a little while now and Darrell Norton has been covering it in a three-part series. What I want to know is, what’s changed since the first edition? It would be extremely (yes but it’s the right word here) valuable to know exactly what’s been […]

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There’s been a lot of talk about viewing code in fancy ways. For instance, James Gosling’s work on Jackpot. Well, how about fancy input as well? Some ideas from the world of HCI: Speech input: Speech is a great way to switch modes and perform simple tasks, without lifting your hands off the keyboard and without moving […]

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