Having been involved in many projects as the leader of the front-end, I have been battling a situation that seems to violate principles of good software architecture. You see, for several years my task has typically been to write HTML for the front-end, template it using PHP tags, ASP.NET “gator” tags, and even Razor syntax in ASP.NET MVC. I would enhance these views with JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS. Everything would seem good.

I have put together a small set of JS logo badges based on the original JS logo by voodootikigod on GitHub. I was looking for a more stylized version of the logo.js suitable for display as a badge on sites and couldn’t really find anything, so I made these for anyone to use. They are under the same license as the originals, available in 512x512, 256x256, 128x128, and 64x64 sizes:

JS Logo Badges download

By popular demand, these are also available for sale on RedBubble.

Consuming third-party JavaScript APIs (some like to call them SDKs) from some authors can be somewhat of a pain. Many are poorly documented, unintuitive to work with, and don’t provide enough hooks to be useful in many situations. Today I’m going to go over my guide for building great JavaScript APIs.

Having neato “single-page” websites using ajax navigation is the fun thing to do with websites lately, but it can pose a problem with search-engine indexing and SEO. The problem stems from search engines not executing JavaScript on webpages, and because the JavaScript won’t run, your pages won’t be indexed.

HDC 2011 OpenRasta RESTful Services and jQuery Consumption

REST Introduction Video

A good read on the importance of a developer to stay sharp in their skills. It also helps to be able to predict where the market will be 6 months from when you plan to leave a job, but that takes a different skill…

Every Developer Has Two Full Time Jobs

Being a JavaScript developer often means that you are left out of any discussions related to server-side code or architecture. Eventually this could present a usability or maintainability problem, and I’d like to bring up why you should care in regards to the topic of REST.

It’s commonly known that JavaScript is technically an object-oriented language, even though it doesn’t seem to follow some of the same language constructs as C# or Java and friends.

For the last several months I seem to be having a recurring argument over comparing variables against undefined in JavaScript. The argument usually starts over code like this:

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var func = function(val) {
  if (val === undefined) {
    // do something
  }
};

I have been thinking the past few days about two particular competing articles I read from Twitter.