From TrumpScript to Remote Jobs: 10 Cool Non-Code GitHub Repositories

The GitHub platform is indispensable to many developers who use it to host their open source code repositories, but did you know it's also used to present a lot of other kinds of interesting and useful information?

In fact, it's used to showcase lists of books, movies, recipes and so on; track the building of a house; find dates (of the social kind -- but there's plenty of date-pickers, too); do wedding logistics; check out baby names (see how those last three run together :) ) prepare for interviews; find remote jobs; check out Congressional districts; find emojis; tell jokes; and on and on and on....

Posted by David Ramel on October 27, 20160 comments

Developers Sound Off on the State of JavaScript

Developer Sacha Greif recently ran his own online poll to gauge the current State of JavaScript 2016, garnering more than 9,000 responses.

The survey resulted in all kinds of information, which I plan on covering in more detail. First, though, I want to focus on the many quotes from the developers responding to the survey, provided by Greif along with the raw data. While such topic-specific data is valuable, sometimes the comments from developers themselves enhance that data.

Posted by David Ramel on October 12, 20160 comments

Coders Just Want To Rant and Confess

Last month I wrote about the new devRant community -- which lets developers publicly rant about coding issues -- when it provided a list of the most annoying programming languages.

Now comes a new app on Apple's App Store titled Coding Confessional - Anonymous Confessions from Programmers, by Pokeo Inc.

Posted by David Ramel on September 13, 20160 comments

So Just How Popular Is the C Programming Language?

Programming language popularity index No. 1: "C is No. 1."

Programming language popularity index No. 2: "C at an all time low."

So which is it?

Both. Which speaks to the problem with programming language popularity indices.

The above example No. 1 was published by IEEE, just a couple weeks before example No. 2, the monthly TIOBE Index report for August.

Posted by David Ramel on August 15, 20160 comments

Malformed Stack Overflow Post Chokes Regex, Crashes Site

A few lessons to be learned here: Watch your backtracking regular expressions; always be ready for the most bizarre edge cases; and, for goodness' sake, don't post questions that contain 20,000 whitespaces.

On Wednesday, the popular programming Q&A site that helps millions of developers with their coding problems was brought down for 34 minutes. According to a follow-up postmortem post explaining the outage, "The direct cause was a malformed post that caused one of our regular expressions to consume high CPU on our Web servers."

Posted by David Ramel on July 22, 20160 comments

Report: Bash Skills Pay Off the Most (Wait, Bash?)

It's not surprising that a new skills survey rounds up the usual list of suspects for the most popular programming language, naming JavaScript, Python, Java, et al.

What is surprising is the list of skills that pay off the most in terms of developer salaries: Bash, Perl and Scala. Bash topped the list at about $100,000.

Posted by David Ramel on July 21, 20160 comments

Apple Wants You: For a Reality Show

Taking reality TV into the world of app programming, Apple is looking for 100 of the world's most talented App Store developers to be featured in a new series called Planet of the Apps.

Propagate, Apple's partner in the project, this week issued a casting call for talent to be featured in the "new unscripted series about the world of apps and the developers who create them."

Posted by David Ramel on July 14, 20160 comments

Pokémon Go: When Imagination Trumps Performance

Being contractually obligated to write about Pokémon Go (not really, but man has this thing hit like a tsunami), I'm opining about technical performance considerations sometimes being trumped by imagination and engagement.

In a development world where software engineers spend hours tweaking bits and bytes to eke out every last microsecond of performance in a function call or ensure rock-solid stability, Pokémon Go seems to break the mold -- to the tune of billions of dollars of increased company stock valuation.

Posted by David Ramel on July 11, 20160 comments

On JavaScript Performance Wars

The interminable JavaScript engine performance wars are continuing, with Microsoft landing the latest blow.

Striking this time was Limin Zhu, program manager for the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers the new Microsoft Edge Web browser.

"Let's look at where Microsoft Edge stands at the moment, as compared to other major browsers on two established JavaScript benchmarks maintained by Google and Apple respectively," Zhu said in a blog post this week. "The results below show Microsoft Edge continuing to lead both benchmarks."

Posted by David Ramel on June 24, 20160 comments

Classes, Modules and Promises: JavaScript Marches On

This JavaScript thing might just catch on.

The world's most popular programming language is starting to look like a real programming language, with classes, modules, promises and more. There's even a lot of excited discussion about proper tail calls and tail call optimization, whatever those are.

Posted by David Ramel on May 18, 20160 comments