rants

If you’ve been following the Javascript MVC landscape lately, you might have noticed a growing tension between Backbone.js and Ember.js. Being championed by Jeremy Ashkenas and Yehuda Katz respectively, both frameworks reside in decidely different camps. Ember.js favors deep…

Static content should be served statically. Disqus rocks. Ruby. Google rewards fast loading times. Markdown. Flat files are awesome.

A while back I stumbled upon a great post by Jean-Baptiste Queru. It describes the incredible depth of the modern technology stack. Layers upon layers of complex science, hardware, and software, each layer creating a simpler abstraction around the previous. This ultimately…

Spending lots of time both coding and designing has given me an acute awareness of how poor design tools are. Design itself has come a long way, but the design process has not. As a disclaimer, most of what is about to be said applies to user interface and graphic design, as…

For roughly two and a half months I have been without a mobile phone of any kind. Two months might not sound like much, but this is coming from a software developer who is entrenched in technology and has even built multiple Android and iOS apps. Before this, I always carried a…

There seems to be a large amount of backlash directed towards Windows 8 due to the fact that it’s new UI exists alongside the old Windows desktop. I must confess that I was slightly shocked myself to witness the context switch take place on the video, but I was shocked in a good…

Roughly three months ago (in the beginning of March), for a variety of reasons, I decided to put my resume out there on the interwebs. Here I chronicle my experience being a software developer on some of the most popular and widely used job channels.

Being both a mobile developer and an avid phone user, I have two somewhat different perspectives. As a user, over the last several years I have owned a multitude of mobile devices: G1, Nexus One, IPhone 3G, IPod Touch (4th Gen), IPad, and IPad 2. As a developer, I have a combined…

I started playing around with the beta of the Flex 4 sdk the other day. The purported features of the new version are very exciting to me, especially the support for advanced CSS selectors as well as enhanced component skinning capabilities.

There is currently a massive amount of buzz around Google’s recently launched browser, Google Chrome. And why not? It’s a new WebKit based browser with a clean minimalist UI and a purportedly super fast V8 Javascript interpreter. To top it off, each webpage executes in its own…

One of my biggest gripes so far with the flex scrolling system is the automatic scrolling policy: a container’s viewing area is not changed by the introduction of scroll bars. This is especially troublesome in the vertical case and seems to be a pretty shitty way of doing things…