After switching over to Firefox from Chrome as my day-to-day browser about a month ago, I instinctively installed Firebug because when I used to use Firefox years ago, it was the essential development addon you installed, usually second only to Adblock Plus.
A lot has changed in Firefox over the years. The internal web development tools within Firefox are exceptionally great. In-fact, they are better than Firebug’s own provided tools and a whole lot more stable. If it weren’t for Firebug, the internal tools probably wouldn’t nearly be as good as they are today.
I am happy to reveal a little collaboration between myself and Jose Garcia called jsdev.io. Essentially it is another place on the interwebs to post front-end related links with an emphasis on Javascript.
We were aware of the fact that there are existing sites for this like Hacker News and Echojs both of which are great sites, but we wanted to take a stab at it ourselves. Not to mention, we managed to snap up a great short domain.
I actually have had a draft of this post in my ideas folder for about one month now and I have been constantly putting it off.
What actually prompted me to finish it was a popular article recently published on Gizmodo entitled: Fuck it, I’m Going Back to Firefox by Eric Limer.
The thoughts of Eric basically mirror those of my own. When Chrome originally hit the scene, Firefox wasn’t in a great state. The blatant memory leak issues that plagued Firefox for multiple versions until they admitted it was an issue in Firefox they needed to fix were one of many reasons for people like myself to jump ship.
As Alfred Pennyworth once profoundly said in The Dark Knight Rises:
Some front-end developers just want to watch the world burn.
Alfred Pennyworth, The Dark Knight Rises
As developers we are constantly learning, always growing and sometimes whether we realise it at the time or not, we are always making mistakes. Sometimes we make mistakes however small that pile on-top of one another which can result in some interesting consequences for our applications performance.
What is Springwise? Essentially it is a database of business ideas, prototypes, products and startups. A network of about 18,000 of people called “spotters” submit content which is then categorised and then put onto the site.
Basically it is a massive catalogue of ideas. The site mentions there are currently 6121 ideas on the site, so there is definitely a lot of content to sort through. The site also claims 3 new ideas are added each day which puts the site at 1095 new ideas per year (based on 365 days in a year).
As ES6 edges closer to evergreen browser support by the estimated mid–2015, many are wondering given the MASSIVE inevitable API breaking changes in Angular 2.0 if it is worth learning the current version of Angular (1.3 at the time of writing this).
The fear around Angular 2.0 I think is overblown. While it will be a complete rewrite, your newfound Angular 1.x skills aren’t just going to go to waste, especially considering Angular 2.0 might not even be released until late 2015/early 2016.
You might have noticed I have been writing about ES6 a lot lately. This is because I am excited about ES6 and thanks to the use of transpilers we can actually use it right now until browsers catch up.
What are Javascript classes? In many ways, they are a sham. Javascript classes don’t really exist other than for cosmetic reasons. They are syntactic sugar over existing Javascript prototypical inheritance. The reason for this was to ensure backwards compatibility, classes merely give you a cleaner way to organise your code.
It’s time for another ES6 post. This time, we’re talking about arguably one of the best additions to Javascript that is up there with modules and classes. I am talking about the ability to specify default parameter values on a Javascript function.
This is one of the biggest missing pieces in Javascript in my opinion. I have encountered the need for this numerous times and while you can definitely implement a solution that does the job, there has been no support for native parameter values until ES6.
On Saturday the 31st of January Queensland public went to the polling booths to cast their vote and say in who gets to lead Queensland going forward. Both sides (LNP and Labor) had been slinging words at one another in what looks like primary school playground fighting all the way up to and during the election.
Looking at it non-objectively, both political parties have their pros and cons. Unfortunately, most people who voted didn’t vote because they took the time to understand which political party aligns with their beliefs but rather instead opting to vote against the socially unpopular party: in this case it is the LNP.
With ES6 comes a plethora of new features and changes, one of those is Weakmaps – essentially Weakmaps are a collection of keys and values with the main constraint being the key has to be an object. In-fact, Weakmaps are very similar to that of standard ES6 maps, with a few constraints.
Unlike using a map which allows for arbitrarily named keys, the key in a Weakmap is an object which can either be {} or function() {} because functions inherit from object.