A blog about design, code and some other stuff

On high-level languages like JavaScript we usually don’t care about how the objects are stored in the memory, we let the VM handle it for us, and since the language contains Arrays most users never find a need for Linked Lists even tho it’s a very powerful and useful data structure.

Like most front-end developers I don’t have a Computer Science degree and started to program using high level languages, it took me a while to stumble into Linked Lists, that’s why I’m going to explain the basic use cases, pros/cons of this simple data-structure and why it’s widely used. - You probably used it before without knowing.

This post was motived by this tweet:

Can anyone explain what a Linked List is and why I’d use one (if I even could in Ruby, PHP, JS). I’m not quite grokking their purpose?— integralist (@integralist) May 12, 2013

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Just a quick tip about Vim autocompletion.

I’ve been using the excellent SuperTab Vim Plugin for a couple years, it works reasonably well (autocompletes based on words from all buffers, file names, tags, context, etc…) but it doesn’t work really well for text that is split by dashes - CSS contains lots of these… - so I started to get frustrated with it.

You can change the auto complete behavior with set iskeyword which also changes the behavior of standard motion commands like w, e, b (it changes the word delimiters) – which a find a PITA since I got used to these motions. My quick and dirty solution to the problem was to keep iskeyword with the minimal value as possible and only change it during InsertEnter. That way I can still use cw, ve, db to edit each fragment, autocomplete will work properly for words like foo-bar__baz, and you can still use W, B and E if you want to quickly jump around. For me that’s the best of both worlds!

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Discussions about modularity are recurrent. Some people say that each function should be a separate module/file/package; others say that methods should be contained by a package and grouped by similarity/concerns; and there is still a 3rd group that thinks that a single namespace is the way to go. I will try to explain the design decisions that influenced the creation and current structure of moutjs and why single function packages are not always the best solution.

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Haters gonna hate but I’ve been delaying for too long to write this one. Since the jQuery team is working to get the version 2.0 out of the door and Christmas is coming it might be a good time to talk about it. Please don’t add comments like “use framework/library X instead!”, the question here is not about which framework/library is better but about things that I think could be improved.

I know that jQuery 2.0 will have the same API as 1.9, this wishlist would be for a future version of jQuery that doesn’t need to be backwards compatible (call it jQuery Harmony or jQuery 3.0 if you will).

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This weekend I spent some time improving the structure of some of my open source projects repositories and also finally decided to add a Travis-ci hook to the most active/newest ones.

Travis is a free continuous integration server for open source projects that can be used to automate tests and help you deal with projects that have multiple contributors. If you are familiar with GitHub you probably seen their build status icons on a few projects before (on the image above). It can be used to test multiple languages like JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java and many others. It also have options to notify the project maintainers every time the build status changes or on each commit. (email, IRC, campfire, etc)

It is really easy to setup it if your tests are already executed on the command line. If the tests needs a browser to work you can hook a headless browser like PhantomJS. - For my projects I’m just executing the tests on node.js for now since that should be enough to catch most errors. - Having a headless browser can help to double check if the code works on multiple environments.

Travis documentation is very clear and the amount of boilerplate is minimal, for a regular node.js project you just need a file named .travis.yml on the root folder containing:

 language: node_js
 node_js: 0.8

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