A blog about design, code and some other stuff

This post is very polemic, I thought a lot before publishing it, please try to be open-minded and read the whole thing before commenting, it is not supposed to become a flame war. Please read the about page to understand the objective of this blog and the way I think about it.

I’ve been considering to use a CSS pre-processor like SASS, LESS, Stylus, etc, for a very long time. Every time someone asked me if I was using any of these tools/languages I would say that I’m kinda used to my current workflow and I don’t really see a reason for changing it since the problems those languages solves are not really the problems I’m having with CSS. Then yesterday I read two blog posts which made me reconsider my point of view so I decided to spend some time today studying the alternatives (once again) and porting some code to check the output and if the languages would really help to keep my code more organized/maintainable and/or if it would make the development process easier (also if they evolved on the past few years).

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Been delaying to write this post for a long time, I think it’s something that experienced developers or people coming from strong typed languages like Java or C# probably already know what I’m going to talk about but for JavaScript developers I think it will be an important information since everyday I see someone (or some famous open-source project) doing it “wrong”.

Strings are evil

Strings are error-prone, a small typo error and your application won’t work as expected and the compiler/environment/VM/etc probably won’t give you any error messages, consider the code below:

    calendar.showMonth('feburary');
    calendar.dispatchEvent('monht/show');

Did you noticed something wrong? “February” and “month” were misspelled, depending on how the code is written you won’t see any error message and have no idea why the month isn’t being displayed and why the event listener isn’t being called…

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source images from public domain (1, 2) and edited by Miller Medeiros

Yesterday I released a piece of code that I wrote a long time ago, it’s called trainwreck.js and it’s main purpose is to provide easy method chaining.

The main reason behind it is because a lot of people don’t really understand how chaining works and end up extending jQuery or underscore.js just to be able to use chaining…

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I’ve seen a few libraries and tools later using different kinds of ways to
handle dependency management, some of them are very similar to the way that
CommonJS modules looks like:

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A couple months ago I posted about using a single entry point for JavaScript applications and how it could simplify the HTML logic and also make dependency management easier. A couple people asked if I had some example and the only examples I had were client projects which I couldn’t share the source code…

I’ve just answered a question on the RequireJS mailing list and used a Gist to explain how single entry point works and how it improves the code structure and simplify dependency management.
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