Yesterday I attended the Global Day of Code Retreat, 2011 in Sydney. We were incredibly privileged to have the creator of Code Retreat, Corey Haines facilitating.
I found the experience to be really very profound and recommend it without reserve to developers of all levels.
Here are some of the things I took from the day:
- My C++/RUP based thinking of OO really needs a makeover
- I thought I was practising Test Driven Development (TDD) but I now see how narrow my understanding of TDD was. The evil coder or Mute with Find the Loophole session of...
— 4 December 2011
· design · software
In my previous post I wrote about a polar curve grapher and its use of Kevin Mehall’s tdop_math.js to parse a user input algebraic expression into a javascript eval(uable) string. I ended up spending some time with tdop_math.js - you can find the source here - and I fell into the magical rabbit hole of Top Down Operator Precedence (TDOP) parsers. This post describes how I ended up writing a TDOP parser for algebraic expressions in Ruby.
Some facts:
- Vaughan Pratt first wrote about Top Down Operator Precedence parsers in 1973
- Douglas Crockford wrote about them in...
— 7 October 2011
· javascript · ruby · math
Polar coordinates and polar functions are remarkably beautiful to people who get mathematics. I think that their graphs are beautiful to most people. Ever since I first met them, I’ve tried to draw them on different platforms and using different languages. Wanting to know more about canvas and javascript, I thought that it would be interesting to implement a polar curve grapher using these.
A quick reminder - the polar coordinates ( r, t ) of a point are expressed in terms of the distance r of the point from the origin and the angle t that the...
— 2 October 2011
· javascript · math
Recently we implemented a variation on a scroller. We needed to flash up a set of snippets, one by one, in the same text area of a page. Here’s a demo of it in action. You can view the source of the demo but here’s a quick, plain-English explanation of how it works.
The markup
In the page, the snippets are list elements li in a section. You can make them definition elements or whatever you like. The section has an id so we can find it from javascript - I’ve called it snippets in the example.
—24 September 2011
· jquery
The flame wars on the topic of editors have probably been around since, well, there was more than one editor to choose from! An IDE or an editor is such a fundamental tool for a developer that it is no wonder we end up having very strong views on our editor of choice. What I have never really understood is why we also tend to have strong negative opinions on editors that we choose not to use — live and let live people! This post is about my journey through the process of selecting an editor — I also...
— 5 February 2011
· editors · vim · newbie
