When we acquired the JavaScripting.com [https://www.javascripting.com] domain well over a year ago, we had a vague idea that we could use it to set up a community website for JavaScript developers. After some thought, this idea crystallized into a vision of a web-based database for JavaScript…
The Chrome Extension Skeleton: Messaging System
When writing our Chrome Extension Skeleton [https://blog.javascripting.com/2014/06/18/the-chrome-extension-skeleton-building-modular-extensions-with-grunt-and-browserify/] , we spent some time thinking about what our extensions have in common and which shared code they would most benefit from. Even though each extension is unique, under the hood: 1. There is some shared state…
Going Functional: Three Tiny Useful Functions - Some, Every, Pluck
Some, Every Every now and then in your everyday programmer’s life you come across an array and you need to determine something, usually whether all the elements in the array pass a certain test. You know, something like: var allPass = true; for (var i = 0; i < arr.length;…
Fastest Growing New Languages on Github are R, Rust and TypeScript (and Swift)
While researching TypeScript’s popularity I ran across a post by Adam Bard [http://adambard.com/blog/top-github-languages-for-2013-so-far/] listing the most popular languages on Github (as of August 30, 2013). Adam used the Google BigQuery [https://developers.google.com/bigquery/] interface to mine Github’s repository statistics. What really interested…
Taming Gruntfiles
Every software project needs plumbing. If you write your code in JavaScript chances are you’re using Grunt [http://gruntjs.com/]. And if your project has been around long enough, chances are your Gruntfile is huge. Even though you write comments and indent properly, the configuration is starting to look…