Many articles have been written about some unacceptable elitist behaviors of software maintainers and other project leaders. I couldn’t agree more, I think nobody should be a jerk. On the other side of the story, do you ever wonder what kind of problems a maintainer usually encounters in his daily r...

Photo by christopher goodband CC BY-SA 2.0.

Nobody likes to read complex code, especially if it’s someone’s else code. A preventive approach to block any complex code entering the application is by watching its complexity carefully.

Apache Ant is quite popular for automating build-related tasks, especially in the enterprise environment and continuous integration systems. Many organizations which already standardized on Ant and start to adopt web application development would want to explore the possibility of keeping Ant for a ...

Achieving a good code coverage is a useful practice in today’s software craftsmanship. For JavaScript applications, whether it is for the browser or for the server, many tools to check the statement coverage are available. What about branch coverage? Fortunately, such a tool is finally available: Is...

Performance optimization of web applications is a hot topic these days. One of the related areas is of course optimizing the application code itself. For client-side application running in the web browser, this means speeding-up JavaScript code whenever possible. Premature optimization is not a good...

Have you written a book, a dissertation, or a report? If you prepare well, everything should be almost perfect until you need to submit it to the editor, the professor, or the supervisor. In fact, almost likely you will read the manuscript again and again, just to ensure that there is no silly mista...

Microsoft finally made Internet Explorer 10 available for Windows 7. It is still in the preview stage, however I’m already curious about its performance characteristics. I decided to run some quick check to see how it stacks up. The test machine is an average Toshiba laptop (Core i3, 2 GHZ) running ...

There are two common mistakes when handling JavaScript variables, accidentally making a variable global and declaring a variable which is never used anywhere. Many well-known code linters can warn the developers when those cases are observed. How does the detection process actually work?

Imagine the following situation. Your little brother starts to smoke cigarettes and your parents are worried about that. As you are close to him, they ask you for your help. The goal is to have your brother stop smoking. What would you do?

An engineer relies on his best tools to carry out tasks which are repetitive, error-prone, or time consuming. For a software engineer, an advanced language tool can improve his life. One of the immediate impacts of using the right tool is the reduced amount of mistakes.

Even though modern computing hardware is getting faster by days, the performance of a software starts to be treated as a feature. Optimization effort, whether it is for mobile applications or for high-volume web sites, generates tons of jobs in the industry. Squeezing the last drops of performance b...

As I wrote in my review of PES 2012, it is now time to look at its closest competitor, FIFA 2012 from Electronic Arts. This Android game is fantastic for football fans, it costs only $5 and the fun lasts forever. The latest Android tablet, Nexus 7, is a perfect device to play the game.

An issue tracker is a valuable asset for any serious software development. Beside serving as a bug database, the tracker can be easily leveraged for technical discussion. GitHub, a popular code hosting service, provides a basic issue tracking system. How does it compare against another established p...

Due to the nature of the language, it is possible to construct JavaScript code that contains syntax errors which do not get detected until it is quite late. Yes, everyone should be using a smart editor or an intelligent IDE or a thorough linter or any other fancy tools, but an engineer is just human...

Nested ternary conditional operators can be useful. In some cases, e.g. to promote better code readability, you may want to outlaw that practice. Armed with a code parser, a simplistic code analysis allows such a pattern detection.

PhantomJS is quite popular for headless testing of web applications. Because it packs real WebKit engine and it does not use any emulated implementation of DOM, CSS, Canvas, etc, PhantomJS can render a web page almost as good as what is expected from a web browser. This feature turns out to be quite...

Strict mode of JavaScript is useful to catch common mistakes, especially from someone new to the language. To get familiarized with strict mode, a real-time online validator can be useful. Such a validator spots all possible strict mode violations which can be detected at parsing time.

Summer is gone. A little plan for me for this autumn is to deliver some tech talks.

One interesting proposal for a class syntax for JavaScript is the so-called maximally-minimal classes. There is no guarantee that this will become the future standard which everyone follows, nevertheless its simplicity is the attractive main point. It may even take years until the popular JavaScript...

Code which never gets tested is an accident waiting to happen. The coverage of the code as it is exercised by the suite becomes an important metric. It is not a surprise if everyone aims to hit that magical 100% coverage. This applies also to the world of front-end web development with JavaScript.

I often still use Google Code Project Hosting service to keep my public repositories. In this age where GitHub is very popular, I often get asked why I bother to do that and not just stick with GitHub. Here is a short explanation.

Many programming languages support the ternary conditional operator. It is very useful to shorten the code since something like:

A timer is essential to the working of many electronics circuits. For modern consumer devices, the software won’t work properly if the timer does not behave as expected. This blog post presents a quick look at something which is quite ubiquitous: real-time clock.

In practical programming, it is quite common to determine whether an object belongs to a set or not. For example, if you implement a spell checker, it is essentially a comparison against the set of all correctly-spelled words. If the set itself is fixed and it never changes, what are the approaches ...

Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) 2012 is the football simulation game from Konami, available in its Android version since a few months ago. As of now, it costs $5.52. How does it feel to play this game on Nexus 7, the latest tablet device from Google? How does it compare with FIFA 2012 from Electronic Art...

Happy Eid Al-Fitr everyone!

QEMU is a very nice virtual machine and system emulator. Running QEMU on a typical Ubuntu installation proves to be quite straightforward. Here is a quick step-by-step tutorial.

Just like many of you, I really love GitHub. It is almost perfect for day-to-day development and nothing beats its social features. However, there are still few gaps to fill until it becomes my top choice for more professional development. One thing which still drives me crazy is its lack of full pr...