A blog about design, code and some other stuff

Ok, I know that writing this post is probably a bad idea but I will do it anyway, please note that this is my personal opinion and not from any company/client I work or worked for and that I respect other people’s opinions (that doesn’t mean I agree with them), I know that some things I’m going to write are going to sound arrogant and that some people are going to get it wrong… please try to keep your emotions aside and think rationally before getting into a conclusion and read the about page to understand the objective of this blog. I don’t want to start a flame war and remember that every person/project has different needs, my perspective and the kind of stuff I’m currently building may be completely different from your needs/desires/preferences… Having that said….

Starting from the beginning

I had plans to do something similar for while, was just starting a new mobile project that would require some basic JavaScript and since I saw that Thomas Fuchs was starting to do it too I thought that “combining forces” we could build something better and I would spend less time on it, specially since everything he does get some pretty big attention on the JS community, which means more people to help.. (since time is a really scarce resource nowadays)
Read more…

On the past couple years I’ve been noticing that the web community (specially front-end devs) started to become more interested and to care way more about performance, trying to make applications load and execute as fast as possible. I think it was mostly influenced by Steve Souders High Performance Website and Yahoo’s Performance Rules.

Performance is a very important topic, which can directly influence the success/fail of an application, but I do believe that some people are getting things wrong and exaggerating a little bit (including myself)… – Of course everybody wants their applications to run and load as fast as possible but “optimizing” things without need is simply wrong. A common quote about performance explain this:

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified” – Donald Knuth

Read more…

The main reason for writing this post is that developers usually have some kind of bias against other programming languages or workflows, specially against those that they don’t know/understand/use… it’s always the same debate: dynamic against strict, strong-typed against loosely-typed, compiled vs. processed, sexy, powerful, expressive, safe, fast, etc..
Read more…

Today I saw on Peter-Paul Koch blog that event delegation for click events on <div> elements doesn’t work properly on the iPhone. Strangely enough, I’ve implemented it 4 days ago (as you can see on this commit) without ever experiencing any kind of problem, that made me insanely curious/scared, specially since I wasn’t doing anything special/different than him and I couldn’t understand what I was doing right/wrong…
Read more…

This week I’ve sent some links about common techniques to improve code performance to the FlashCodersNY mailing list and after sending a link about the Duff’s Device and the Fast Duff’s Device I got really curious if the performance could be improved with simple changes so I decided to do some benchmarks…
Read more…