I'm a big proponent of unit testing. This means that any code I can test, I do. When I work in the browser, however, it becomes more challenging to effectively unit test all of the code I write without spinning up an instance of PhantomJS ...

Quite some time ago, Michael O. Church wrote a blog post about the Shodan Programmer (beginning degree programmer, or journey beginning programmer). In this post he detailed a gradient system for identifying programmers with regard to ski ...

A common complaint from both the Javascript religious and the newcomers alike is Javascript is tremendously difficult to debug when things go sideways. When a null or undefined reference is passed, the stack trace can be illuminating or i ...

If you are unit testing your code, and you should be, then it is likely you have encountered certain patterns which make testing more difficult. One of the patterns which pops up often is centered around Express.js routes. Although the ro ...

Javascript is a dynamically typed language. I suspect this is not news to anyone reading this. The reason this is important, however, is I have heard people say Javascript is untyped. This statement is most definitely false. Javascript ha ...

Dear programmers coming from Classical Object Oriented programming, please stop thinking that encapsulation of variables eliminates the "globalness" of your variable. It's a hard truth, but you had to hear it from someone; you have a probl ...

For more than a year I have been considering the idea of pattern matching in Javascript. I know I am not the only one trying to solve this problem because there are a handful of resources where people have put together propositions for sol ...

An exchange at work got me thinking this last week. Someone said "I really hate regex." For those of you not in the loop on the lingo, regex means regular expressions. After a little prying, it turned out the reason they didn't like regu ...

On Thursday and Friday I was at a convention called Agile Open San Diego. The core idea is people getting together and having two full days of water cooler discussions about agile development and leadership. It's pretty cool and you should ...

A while ago we talked about creating a custom type in Javascript using object inheritance. There were a couple of fundamental issues with this post: first it was fairly academic and was unlikely to be applicable to the real world; second w ...