Lessons from an intermediate programmer-journalist (part 3 of 3)
Thanks to my recent awakening in embracing a programmer identity, I’ve learned a lot. Self perception is a lot more important than we might think in our day-to-day work, and my eyes have been opened. Coming from a journalism background, and realizing coding means so many things, and has so much power, can be a […]
Lessons from an intermediate programmer-journalist’s journey (part 2 of 3)
No programmer is an island. Back in grad school, I learned a journalistic tenet of avoiding specialized jargon, to make our writing more accessible for readers. But when it comes to working with technology, there is a strong role for embracing what I like to call “The Words”. While jargon can be confusing for the […]
JS Design Patterns: Chapter 5 – Object Creation Patterns
Several months ago (sometime in the fall), I was logging some notes and thoughts on the JS Design Patterns book, as we work our way through selected portions in a small group at work. It’s been a while, but for this week, we took on some material that I thought might be interesting to share. […]
Lessons from an intermediate journo-programmer’s journey (part 1 of 3)
I’ve had some opportunities to think back on my journey over the past five years — from student to teacher in the same classroom, from writing my first lede to building highly technical projects and systems for journalism. It’s been a long journey, but one constant has been my phrase “I am a journalist first […]
On best practices: Re-examining the philosophy of how I code
What does it mean to “grow up” to the next level of how we work? How do we take hacking to find a solution, any solution, and turn it into a purposeful, logical craft? It’s a question I’ve been trying to approach for the last year. So, when you ask me what I’m doing these […]
Functions – Chapter 4, JavaScript Patterns
In this week’s selection, the JavaScript Patterns book continues into its interesting deep dive on the intracacies of how the language works, looking at functions, or the blocks of code that can actually do something. JS has some quirks everywhere, but particularly in this area, and I think functions and how they work have a […]
JavaScript Patterns — Chapter 3
In this reading, we focus on literals and constructors. Again, this continues the exploration into the fundamentals of how JavaScript works — with the goal of being able to grok design patterns — ways of formatting bits of code in the language when structuring systems, all designed to handle the most common cases. Put another […]
Learning…how to think ahead about big-picture coding problems
In past posts on this blog, and conversations with mentors, colleagues and friends — we have lamented the difficulty of the learning path for the intermediate coder. The posts I’ve been writing about recommended book readings are part of a step forward. But if one is not careful, they become an academic exercise. It’s in […]
JavaScript Patterns – Chapters 1 and 2
I certainly love stretching my mind and learning new things, but after weeks of reading Ruby and more strictly-typed languages, I breathe a sigh of relief every time I step back into JavaScript world. Some people like it, some people hate it, but for me, it’s just where I spend the most coding time, and […]
An introduction to design patterns — trying again
This week, we leave Fowler’s Refactoring behind in favor of embarking on a journey exploring design patterns. As I understand it, when writing code, there are certain ways of structuring a program or application as a whole that are patterns on which we can base the design of code. This is a topic that has […]
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