Category: Posts

  • Classes in JavaScript

    First lesson with classes today. First of all I was pleased to see they exists since we’ve just been plucking objects out of thing air like:} but with classes we can declare a class and instantiate an object of it: There’s (at least) single inheritance: Of course it’s JS, so there’s no named arguments, and…

  • Things I love about Swift after a week of JavaScript

    So, a week into JavaScript, what am I missing? The techie in me wants to say things like Automatic Reference Counting, but actually, at my junior level, I don’t run into memory management issues on the day-to-day, so what really do I miss? Determinism When I build an iOS app, it’s frozen in time. The…

  • Second Guessing

    In the last post, I was pleased with myself for accidentally anticipating an improvement to a tutorial project which turned out to be the next task, today I’m pleased with myself for discussing the pros and cons of onclick= vs addEventListener() then having that same discussion turn up in the next tutorial. I take it…

  • 99 CSS Layout challenge

    In the Zero To Mastery Complete Web Developer course, I’m up to the first practical challenge – to use CSS to layout a reasonably standard looking web page using flex-box and grid to make it responsive. Frustratingly, both for writing this, and while I was trying to build the page, I’m unable to screenshot the…

  • HTML 002 – Tags for structure

    I briefly mentioned earlier that our HTML tags should flag WHAT this part of the document is rather than how to display it (we’ll look at how to use CSS for making the content look how we want later). This idea is called semantic HTML. This post will look at some of the tags (often…

  • Visual Studio Code

    I’ve gone over to the dark side a little. As I think about the sort of apps I want to make, I realise I am going to need to be able to do back-end web development. My apps are going to need a secure REST api to a database. I guess that means node.js. I’m…

  • Clean code

    I’ve been listening to the latest episode of the Empower Apps podcast, this one with Jill Scott talking about “Humane” development – in the sense of being humane to whoever (probably you) is going to be reading this code in the future. It helped me clarify my thoughts about a couple of things. None of…

  • SwiftUI provides

    A few hours after I speculated about pausing work on the tickets app because outputting the tickets was too far out of my expertise, a helpful instance of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon threw up some help in the form of this tweet from @FloWritesCode. It turns out this was an addition in iOS16 announced at WWDC…

  • Committed

    I quite like logging into GitHub and seeing my commit history as the graph with the green dots. Once I get up to a year it would be a great thing to have on a T-Shirt. I’d expect to be seeing the busy weekends, but Tuesday nights seem to be oddly productive. It could just…

  • Ticket to ride

    A couple of days ago I was lauding the learning benefits of writing your own projects over completing tutorial projects – since your own projects push your boundaries further. Of course, its also the case that the project requirements might so completely exceed your current ability that it grinds to a halt. That’s the case…