A blog about design, code and some other stuff

I have no data to backup my theory; it’s just a trend that I observed in the past years. The amount of headlines like “10 places you should visit before you die”, “15 best jQuery plugins of the year”, “best video you will watch today” keeps increasing; I blame the rise of social media and the death of RSS readers.

It’s sad to admit it; but if a headline isn’t sensationalist, the likelihood of someone reading it and sharing it, is not as high.

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I was reading some of my old blog posts, and also some code that I wrote during the past few years, and it’s really hard to not notice that I was a total noob.

Don’t call it Impostor Syndrome, I’m talking about a different feeling. It’s more a realization that over the past few years I improved A LOT, both my writing and coding skills. Nowadays I can spot mistakes and misconceptions that I couldn’t see before. It’s also important to remind that being a noob is totally subjective and that there are different levels of noobness.

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I remember that my first contact with programming loops was through the for statement and I used it almost exclusively for many years. I’ll explain why I’ve been favoring while loops over for loops in the past couple years. Beware that this is only my personal preference and the reasoning behind it are very subjective. Use what works better for you.

TL;DR: while is less verbose and more clear in many cases.

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(not sure if the pirate image + caption was created by Zeh Fernando, he sent it to me a couple years ago, forgot to ask him…)

Another polemic subject and something that I’ve been delaying for a while, I’ll try to explain how I got to my conclusions and I’m sure a lot of people won’t agree until they experience the same problem or realize how often it may happen on a real project and specially if it does happen with a code you don’t “own” and/or can’t change without compromising future updates… The advice is mostly about JavaScript (since it’s what I’ve been coding more lately and where I think the issue is bigger) but it also fits other languages.

Not so long ago I had an opposite opinion about this subject - I would always set everything to private and only changed to protected/public if needed - try to understand what made me change my opinion and pay attention every time you find yourself “tied” or doing lots of hacks just because you can’t monkey-patch a simple function/variable.

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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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