There's nothing like jsconf for bringing out the meta! Since the conference ended two blog posts have created a lot of buzz, at least within my own twitter bubble.First, Rebecca Murphey's JavaScript: It's a Language, Not a Religion. I take Rebecca's post as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hero-worship and the tendency to assume that the people we respect in one sphere share our views in other spheres. I bring it up here not because I want to discuss the content of her post but because I'm ripping off her title.The second blog post was Ryan Funduk's Our Culture of Exclusion. Ryan talk...

Many people get tripped up by the this keyword in JavaScript. I think theconfusion comes from people reasonably expecting this to work like “this”does in Java or the way people use “self” in Python. Although this issometimes used to similar effect, it’s nothing like “this” in Java or otherlanguages. And while it’s a little harder to understand, its behavior isn’tmagic. In fact, this follows a relatively small set of simple rules. Thispost is an explanation of those rules.But first, I want to give some terminology and information about Ja...

I’m probably a bit biased – being a front-end web developer for a few years will do that – but I really enjoy writing Javascript. I’ve recently retreated from pure coding the last few months, but I got an opportunity this past week to jump back into some tasks, and it has reminded me how fun it is to dive into our[1] front-end codebase.Yes, Javascript can be surprisingly elegant yet completely infuriating, and all on the same line of code; for a long time, it remained the joke of the programming community, the deranged cousin that outuglied even the likes of PHP...

JavaScript has two zeros: -0 and +0. This post explains why that is and where it matters in practice.The signed zeroNumbers always need to be encoded to be stored digitally. Why do some encodings have two zeros? As an example, let’s look at encoding integers as 4-digit binary numbers, via the sign-and-magnitude method. There, one uses one bit for the sign (0 if positive, 1 if negative) and the remaining bits for the magnitude (absolute value). Therefore, -2 and +2 are encoded as follows. Binary 1010 is decimal -2 Binary 0010 is decimal +2 Naturally, that means that there will be ...

I probably could have named this post something like “Writing clean, validating and portable JavaScript”, but that would be no where near as catchy. The problem with “great” is it means different things to different people. I am going to show you my idea of great which may differ from many developers views, but I hope it helps someone improve their code.So what’s the point in this, why can’t you just carry on writing JavaScript as you have been for ages. It works doesn’t it? Well if you took the same opinion with a car and drove on 20 year old tires...

It is very often that I have to do video motion tracking for interactive video campaign in my daily work.If I’m used used to do that in Flash, I made a quick experiment to do the same in javascript.Thanks to Olof Storm who made me a perfect corner pin motion tracking in After Effects, and I’ve been using some code from Steven Wittens to draw an image in perspective.Click here to see the motion tracking demo (give it a bit of time to fully load).What I’m doing in this demo is drawing a video in a canvas, and using the corner pin tracking data to draw an image on top of the ...

A web developer today is expected to be an expert in every aspect of their craft and JavaScript is no exception.  Years ago JavaScript seemed to be more of an annoyance, producing those trailers at the bottom of the browser.  This has changed and JavaScript is a first-class citizen as a functional programming language and what seems like an unlimited number of resources covering the language.I have been doing more and more JavaScript lately, both on the front-end and some node.js on the back end.  I wanted to share some great resources I use for what’s new with regards to...

I was making a change to a page that needed to pull from a remote API and make changes to various parts of the page. Sounds like the time to pull out jQuery and Ajax, doesn't it? Instead, I just used old fashioned JavaScript. Actually, I used new fashioned JavaScript. Browsers haven't stood still in the advent of libraries and frameworks. As a result, we can take advantage of those features when we need to bake in a little extra.Some JSONPThe first step was to get the JSONP call executing. This is generally straightforward: embed a script tag into the page. The script will run a function that ...