Recently I got together with some local developers to discuss client side MVC frameworks. We ended up discussing many of the differences between AngularJS and Ember. Discourse is an Ember application and has been since the first prototype, so I have a lot of experience with it. However, it became cl...

Trade offs As a developer you’re constantly faced with issues of choice: What library is best? What framework is best? What platform should we deploy on? Most of the time there isn’t a clear winner. The decision you make comes down to a series of trade offs. Do you want to optimize for developer hap...

Update May 26, 2014 The concepts in this article are still true, but I’ve recorded a screencast showing how to use ember without ember data using ember-cli and the latest version of Ember. It goes beyond the contents of this article, showing how to create an adapter, store and even your own identity...

Recently we ported Discourse from CoffeeScript to plain old Javascript. The process was straightforward since CoffeeScript spits out fairly good Javascript, although I did have to spend the better part of a day cleaning it up afterwards. (Note: we’d love any patches to further tidy up the generated ...

Shortly after we began working together on Discourse, Jeff wrote a post about infinite scrolling. At first, I was surprised at how many people claimed to hate sites that used it. However, after reading through many comments about it, I realized that most didn’t hate the scrolling itself, they hated ...

This week, I was delighted to finally reveal Discourse, the app I’ve been working on for most of the last year in secrecy with awesome people. The launch got a lot of attention - we were featured on Hacker News, Slashdot, Wired, Reddit, Techcrunch and countless other places. Personally I’ve been flo...

ShitRedditSays and The Downvote Brigades of Reddit (note: if you’re familiar with reddit and ShitRedditSays, you can skip to the next section.) As you probably know, Reddit is a site that revolves around voting. All users are encouraged to vote on things, which are then prioritized based on their to...

A story of a game exploit Once upon a time I developed a somewhat popular web game called Forumwarz. At its peak, we were serving about 6 million dynamic requests a day off a single quad-core server. Forumwarz limits how many turns a player can take in a day. We designed it this way so that the comp...

Turbolinks Turbolinks is a new Ruby library, enabled in Rails 4 by default, that is designed to speed up your web applications. It does this by binding a Javascript handler to all link clicks. Instead of allowing the browser to load the new page, it fetches it in the background via AJAX. It then par...

Recently, I wrote a short essay on privilege and programming. It was quite popular on /r/programming and generated hundreds of comments, both there and on this blog. I was surprised and flattered to see the majority of the comments agreed with my post, however a few people brought up a concern which...

When I was in grade 6, I handed out a couple of 3 1/2" floppy disks to a couple of friends in my class whose parents had recently purchased PCs. On each disk was a game I created. You’d fly a ship horizontally through outer space. It had two controls, up and down, to avoid asteroids. The longer you ...