the blog: tag= programming
Do it any which way
- Date
- 6/08/2008 11:09:00 PM [permalink]
- Author
- yahooza
- Entry
- It's been over seven months and I've learned a lot from independent consulting. Mostly, a contractor is hired on a per hour basis, because there is an urgent need for a skillset or simply to fix the FUBAR.
I must admit, it's not m' specialty. Reading others' code is quite an ordeal and I'd rather ideate (is that a real word yet?) or start from scratch. All those great articles from Christian and Dustin can be far-reaching ideals in the majority of web software projects. Douglas Crockford has said it many times that JavaScript is an expressive language and a programmer can craft his code in many ways w/ JS's flexible style.
Case in point is m' current nemesis, an interesting way to mold a web view. Each page first declares a config object (literal). It is the means to which a subsequent JS command (loaded as an src.include) will fire XHR calls to retrieve data, massage it and prepare to load the content into the DOM when it becomes ready.
An interesting means to say the least. It's a different design philosophy and quite foreign to me. Is it wrong? No, not at all. But it has been quite a duel to refactor and separate the code into various modules.
And did I mention the lack of documentation? =) More fun tomorrow!Labels: programming, softwaredesign
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Stumbling thru
- Date
- 3/07/2008 08:47:00 AM [permalink]
- Author
- yahooza
- Entry
- The weakest points of interviewing are the compsci and algorithmic questions. I'm a visual person, so solving these abstract puzzles befuddles me.
I can only recall 2 of the most recent 3 examples.- Parse any ol' JSON string into a (Java) HashMap
String j = '{
"request_id":"t4268dfg45xz3498",
"data":{"person":[{"first_name":"","last_name":"","nickname":""}]}
}'; - Given two strings
String k = "mcloven", l = "cloverfield strangelove", find all intersections. In this case, "clove" and "love"
Labels: interview, programming
- Parse any ol' JSON string into a (Java) HashMap
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Impl diffs
- Date
- 12/06/2007 03:26:00 PM [permalink]
- Author
- yahooza
- Entry
- http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/12/embed-charts....
Google released an API to generate charts via a URI."That's it - no state, no calls, just send your data in an http request and get a png image graph back. Embed the request in an img tag and you're done. We currently support line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and sparklines."
It reminds me of a Y! colleague who did something similar for an internal tool (yet another dashboard for execs). Is it reusable? No, prolly not. The main point I want to make is that now Google can use this feature across all their products, whilst each Y! fiefdom will continue to reinvent over and over that same wheel.Labels: apis, programming
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Interview question (Nice!)
- Date
- 9/06/2007 11:04:00 PM [permalink]
- Author
- yahooza
- Entry
- M' boss, Bart, asked a nifty interview question to a potential candidate that I found intriguing: "Gimme a function that determines a string's length without the use of local variables" He explained it to me and I spruced it up to parse a paragraph of text:function f(s) {
return (s.length>0)?(((null===s.charAt(0).match(/\S/))?0:1)+f(s.substring(1))):0;
}
Neat.Labels: programming
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- 3 +add yours
Picking up Ruby again
- Date
- 8/19/2007 09:36:00 PM [permalink]
- Author
- yahooza
- Entry
- http://locomotive.raaum.org
I stumbled upon Locomotive, "a simple tool to help you develop Ruby on Rails applications on Mac OS X." It's self-contained, running your Ruby instance within a jailed environment. The best part is that I don't have to worry about compiling Ruby to upgrade from the default version that shipped w/ OSX.
Ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby soho. Time to learn to learn another language and framework.Labels: programming, ruby, rubyonrails, softwaredesign
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