I have been an avid user of Sublime Text Editor for as long as I can remember. I still remember when I used to use Notepad++ and the day I switched over to Sublime. I used the trial for about a week and then bought a licence for $70 (a big deal for me at the time due to not earning much money).
But now I feel as though Sublime Text Editor has fallen behind. Don’t get me wrong, it is a glorious text editor and I not only use it to code, but I also compose emails in it, I write Markdown and take notes in it. Sublime has always been there but I have yearned for more
One of many favourite things in ECMAScript 6 (aka ES6) is the newly added arrow functions. If you’re a Coffeescript user then the arrow function premise is not entirely new to you.
Essentially it allows you to create an anonymous function with the contextual value of “this” being the scope of the function being that of the outer function that the arrow function is being defined in. Nor does it expect you to use the keyword function
In 2013 I had my first experience with UK customs at Heathrow Airport. I had never been to the UK before, but my soon-to-be-wife has UK roots. Her parents immigrated over here 20 years ago and she has tonnes of family in the UK still.
We were visiting her nan and other family she has in the UK. A couple of aunts and uncles, her other nan as well. What actually sparked this post was this news story I read about a debate in UK parliament about making it easier for Australian and New Zealand’s to travel, work and live in the UK.
While browsers play catchup with ES6 support and we wait for older browsers without ES6 support to fizzle out and die, we can actually start using ES6 today thanks to the work of Google’s Traceur or BabelJS.
Whichever you choose for whatever reason, as long as the resulting code is ES5 compatible and your needs have been met, then really there is no competition between any transpiler except for perhaps the resulting code and various parts of the specification that are supported.
Recently I switched my writing workflow for all of my blog posts to Markdown. I compose all my blog posts in Markdown, sync them with Dropbox and then publish them. In doing so, I have noticed the quality of my posts has increased, the frequency of which I write has increased and more importantly, witness an unprecedented amount of growth in blog traffic.
Why Markdown? Writing in Markdown is so liberating, it is just text with a little sugar sprinkled over the top. Creating headings just means I have to write a # followed by text and bump up the number of # depending on the type of heading.
Things just got real in the front-end framework space. Durandal developer Rob Eisenberg and once upon a time short-term core Angular 2.0 developer has announced a new framework called Aurelia. A beautifully designed full-stack SPA framework with support for ECMAScript 6 syntax right out of the box and some clever design decisions.
Not only does it allow you to build applications using ES6, but it supports all forms of alternative abstraction syntax out of the box like TypeScript, AtScript and even CoffeeScript. Rob has plans to put out migration documentations detailing how to migrate from Angular 1.x, Angular 2.x and of course: Durandal. They are not currently available, but are on the roadmap as can be seen here.
Call me un-Australian, a non-conforming individual, a meta-hipster or what you will, but I just don’t see the appeal of the Triple J Hottest 100. A countdown which somehow seems to seduce both hipsters and true-blue Aussie bogans into not only participating in the voting process but also tuning into the radio station for an entire day.
A favourite past-time of many who like to celebrate Australia day with a few cold ones, an assorted selection of traditional BBQ meats (sausages, steak and chicken) and a radio tuned to Triple J in the background as people comment on songs being played so far and what will be in the top 20, top 10 and top 3.
During my relatively small amounts of down time I sometimes like to unwind with a beer, a few friends and play a game of GTA V on my PS4 (which largely collects dust). Because I do not get to play that often, I have resorted to finding ways to shortcut the process of getting money and XP.
In my travels I discovered a money glitch which nets you a nice little profit and works as of January 26th, 2015. To my knowledge it works on all platforms (last-gen and current-gen).
Without fail, every single day I get multiple calls from the number 02 8015 7641 for the last week or so. They keep trying to call, yet don’t seem to leave a message on my voicemail. I keep putting off answering the call after some Googling seems to indicate that it is some kind of scam or competition.
So, after being constantly hassled day-after-day I tried calling the number back with my caller ID on private. I tried a few times and I kept getting this pre-recorded message in an English accent that said: “All of our agents are currently busy, please stay on the line, your call is important to us and will be answered shortly” – then it hangs up on you. Weirdly enough, the number doesn’t even ring which leads me to believe it is some kind of automated spam/scam.
With HTML5 came a plethora of useful API’s and added methods, one of those which didn’t really get as much visibility (ha, get it?) was the Page Visibility API.
What is the Page Visibility API? The clue is in the name. It allows you to determine if a page is visible (a tab is focused or window being shown). Historically we haven’t really been able to reliably determine if a visitor is looking at a page and as such, can cause issues when media is being played.