If your library is being used by many other applications, it is often a good idea to run their test suites. Since those downstream applications may break because of your library, this helps catching those cases before you officially release a new public version of the library.

These days, we can reach anyone on this planet, anywhere they are located, anytime we like. However, we often never realize that it is only possible because there is a high-bandwidth Internet backbone running on modern and sophisticated fiber optic transmission systems.

Building a web application without testing it on the major consumer browsers will be crazy. Fortunately, we have a few cross-browser testing services such as Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, and many more. Still, for a quick sanity check on the latest stable version of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, no...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single function critical to the success of the application, must be in want of a unit test. A practical way to prevent the lack of a unit test is to ensure that the overall code coverage does not regress. Fortunately, for applications written in JavaScr...

In many tech conferences and other events, we see a trend where the speaker rarely introduces themselves or even when they do, it is rather short (and sweet). Why does this happen? Is that a good trend or a bad one?

At the most recent jQuerySF conference, Mike Sherov and I did a joint talk on the topic of JavaScript Syntax Tree: Demystified. The highlight of the talk was the demo from Mike as he showed how to fix coding style violations automatically.

With a complex application, it is often convenient to have a function that returns not just one value. There are many different ways to achieve this in C++, from using a structure to taking advantage of the latest C++ 11 tuple class template.

There are various hosted continuous integration services out there that you can use for your Node.js projects, from Travis CI to drone.io and many others. If you feel adventurous or you are always fascinated by a DIY solution (for whatever reasons), it is apparently quite easy to setup your own CI s...

Little did I know that the start of my adventure with Esprima three years ago will result in something beyond my expectation. While the syntax tree format used by Esprima is not original (see SpiderMonkey Parser API), this de-facto format gains a lot of traction since it provokes a Cambrian explosio...

Some time ago, I came up with a bar joke involving SMTP. Since I need to explain it a couple of times, I thought I just write it down as a blog post for future reference.

In some cases, an instance of a C++ class should not be copied at all. There are three ways to prevent such an object copy: keeping the copy constructor and assignment operator private, using a special non-copyable mixin, or deleting those special member functions.

While a build system is always critical to the success of a software project, maintaining such a system is not always fun. Hence, we tend to investigate many different ways to reduce the maintenance effort. Thanks to Docker, there is a possibility to have the build agent itself very simple because i...

The most recent Shellshock, a vulnerability in the popular shell bash, got me to evaluate again the unique setup on Ubuntu/Debian. In this setup, script execution is not handled by bash, this job is carred out by dash, the Debian Almquist Shell. Meanwhile, bash is still used for the interactive shel...

Last week I was in Chicago for the most recent jQuery Conference, part of my autumn tour. It was a fantastic opportunity to have some face-to-face conversations as well as to get to know different folks in the jQuery community. Most importantly, I feel the urge to recall the revolution of the web, i...

With so many great cross-platform libraries out there, there is hardly any need to reinvent the wheel. In many cases, it is even possible to extract a portion of a sophisticated multi-platform application code to be reused in a different application. In this example, a basic CPU detection class from...

After a short pause, I’ll be giving tech talks again in a few weeks. The first one will be for jQuery Conference in Chicago, the other one is for the autumn edition of HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, we are now working torward stabilizing the development version of PhantomJS. One thing I would like to elaborate here with respect to the features of this forthcoming PhantomJS 2 is its improved JavaScript support.

Mastering GNU Debugger (gdb) is an essential skill for many programmers these days. In many cases, debugging using gdb is carried out straight from your favorite editor or IDE. For a quick stand-alone debugging session, a nice alternative is to use a visual, terminal-based wrapper for GDB called cgd...

Recently, Google engineers landed a new optimizing JavaScript compiler for V8, codenamed TurboFan. As the name implies, this is supposed to further improve JavaScript execution speed, likely to be better than its predecessor, Crankshaft. While TurboFan is still in its early stage, that doesn’t mean ...

It is been a while since PhantomJS received a facelift. This is about to change, the current master branch is now running the unstable version of PhantomJS 2. Among others, thing brings the fresher Qt 5.3 and its updated QtWebKit module.

TeamCity from JetBrains is an easy-to-use and powerful continuous integration system. It is a commercial product, but there is a special zero-cost license for small projects and FOSS applications. While installing TeamCity is relatively easy, its setup is further simplified via the use of Docker.

For an automated build system, a typical configuration involves the separation between the build server and the build agents (some systems call it master-slave or coordinator-runner). Such a configuration allows any addition or removal of new build agents, perhaps to improve the build performance, w...

At some point, a software project will grow beyond its original scope. In many cases, some portions of the project become their own mini world. For maintenance purposes, it is often benefical to separate them into their own projects. Furthermore, the commit history for the extracted project should n...

Last week, one of my favorites conferences, Velocity Conference, took place in Santa Clara. Beside the joy of meeting old friends and making new acquaintances, Velocity was exciting for me due to its crazy amount of excellent materials to digested post-conference. In addition to that, this was also ...

The Spurs just recently won the 2014 NBA Finals with a series of convincing games. Most importantly however, they demonstrated the amazing traits of unselfishness and teamwork. It is not about getting the individual fame and glory, it is all about working together towards the common goal.

When dealing with annoying people, there are at least two possible choices: ignore them or contain them. The former is a popular advice for combatting Internet trolls. The question is, shall we start to move slowly towards the containment tactic?

In the world of virtualization nowadays, Docker is the new kid on the block. It is almost trivial to set up and play with it when you are running Linux. What if, like many geeks out there, you are using OS X as your primary development system? Two possible solutions are discussed here, using boot2do...

NaN, not a number, is a special type value used to denote an unrepresentable value. With JavaScript, NaN can cause some confusion, starting from its typeof and all to the way the comparison is handled.

There is a definite convergence of solution duality in services like Dropbox, Box, Apple iCloud, and Google Drive. The first two started from being a content synchronization/storage and then moved towards an identity solution, the other two are known to have existing users lured into the cloud stora...

A unique feature of Venus.js, a JavaScript test runner from LinkedIn, is that the test configuration can be in the form of source annotation. This is useful, e.g. to choose which test library (Mocha, Jasmine, QUnit) should be used to execute the tests. Now, wouldn’t it be fantastic if the test runne...