John Resig

Practice as a habit.

Practicing something repeatedly, preferably every day, is the best way to get better at something. I started programming every day after being inspired by a blog post by John Resig that got posted to HN [1]. I started a game that I've been working on for 245 days straight. I started with almost no knowledge of game programming and now have, I dare say, a playable game. Github really helped with this because you get a nice display of your commit history over the past year that gives an incentive to not break the chain [2].

I've been able to apply this to other skills I've wanted to get better at: relearning how to play the piano, making music, working out, etc. and have seen great results.

1. [http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/]
2. [http://i.imgur.com/6zq1IbJ.png]

In my opinion, a zen master should be able to declare classes, extend them, do mixins, construct one off instances and synthetic classes, access super class' methods the old school way, etc without helper functions like the ones listed in the article. Be able to use and master the tools the language gives you.

Don't be afraid of the language; but do acknowledge that it is a toy language with lots of invisible death traps. Establish a coding convention that lets your team build and test large scale applications effectively. If that includes helpers and tools, (I like Resig's class.js myself, http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/) then great! Just please make sure the team can do it all without the helpers so that they understand all that is possible.

Just because a problem has been "solved" for one platform (Fast PC's w/ Gigabytes of ram/disk) doesn't mean it is solved for all platforms (Web apps for phones/tablets, etc).

John Resig (of jQuery and Khan Academy fame) had a really interesting thread on creating a fast-loading (i.e. small, efficient) dictionary for a JavaScript app. http://ejohn.org/blog/revised-javascript-dictionary-search/

The comments have some really clever ideas for encoding the dictionary and Resig weighs in on his favorite solution with informative data. There's an interesting "Succinct Trie" data structure that turns a 620K dictionary into a 220K string that doesn't need to be decoded to be searched.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=120

This would be a great demo to see running in a responsive programming environment, ala Bret Victor's amazing Inventing on Principle talk (http://vimeo.com/36579366). I want to be able to click on hex values and get a color picker that updates the demo in realtime, and be able to click on various magic numbers and drag a slider to change them.

Incidentally, Bret Victor's talk was the starting point for Khan Academy's CS curriculum that John Resign led (http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/).

Edit: I managed to get this running in livecoding.io, which does some of what Bret Victor was talking about (basic sliders and color pickers): http://livecoding.io/4191583. Not sure why it's running so much slower though...

I have great admiration for the amount of time and precision put into this article--as well as Amazon's relentless, cold, uncool devotion to optimization.

These meditations on A/B optimization reminded me of a genetic algorithm-based A/B testing framework mentioned not too long ago: http://ejohn.org/blog/genetic-ab-testing-with-javascript/ (I'd link to Genetify itself, but there's no homepage, just the demo)

An interesting thought: Why hasn't this caught on? Machines are good at exactly the things A/B testing aims at: measuring performance, permuting a test-matrix, and reporting on the results. This is not to say Genetify is the answer, but rather that I rarely hear of conversion optimization from developers.

I don't know - I love PHP classes but I'd love to see PHP with prototype-style inheritance (if PHP had classes for strings, etc. in respect to basic variable types). I think the "everything is an object" route is great and coupling that with prototypes exemplifies that decision's greatness.

However, I really do think that JavaScript needs all of the great things ECMA 5 displays first and foremost (such as strict mode, getters/setters/enumerable/configurable/writable for property descriptors).

John Resig does an excellent job of summing up ECMA 5 pragmatically (it truly must be great to work on JavaScript stuff as a day job): http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-objects-and-properties/