Technology Arbitrage

An amazing and well respected iOS-biased tech person said the other day that ‘he doesn’t do unit testing’. I assume he means:

1. he is so good at writing code he never tests to see if it crashes
2. apple’s code writing interface is so good that it helps you write code that will be mostly working by the time a user touches it
3. he’s not bothered to find problems with the code - he’ll be lazy and rely on users to let him know

I think that’s what makes modern tech startups successful. But many money people are used to giving money to polished business folks, and not awkward tech people or scrappy entrepreneurs. And oftentimes, money helps an idea/product/business go a long way…

One day a technical person said to me: “I don’t do scripting languages. [sneer]” And I thought… what is a scripting language, and why is it not as good as …what is the alternative - is it called programming language?

Or would it be the case that the technical person was being bumptious:

The idea that the two types are separate (“versus”) comes from people who are trapped in the mindset that a language cannot be both convenient and powerful. Mostly, these people have a C or C++ background, and they’ve worked hard to stay as close as possible to their language of origin (Java, C#). It’s natural that they choose to denigrate whatever the new, popular language is this way. - Jesse Millikan

(Source: programmers.stackexchange.com)

Summary:

• use asynchronous calls, don’t load the whole thing over and over;
• use OAuth, don’t use SOAP;
• use JSON, don’t use XML.

When designing an application that will communicate with a remote computer, a data format and exchange protocol must be selected. There are a variety of open, standardized options, and the ideal choice depends on the applications requirements and pre-existing functionality. For example, SOAP-based web services format the data in an XML payload wrapped within a SOAP envelope.

While XML works well for many application scenarios, it has some drawbacks that make it less than ideal for others. One such space where XML is often less than ideal is with Ajax-style web applications. Ajax is a technique used for building interactive web applications that provide a snappier user experience through the use of out-of-band, lightweight calls to the web server in lieu of full-page postbacks. These asynchronous calls are initiated on the client using JavaScript and involve formatting data, sending it to a web server, and parsing and working with the returned data. While most browsers can construct, send, and parse XML, JavaScript Object Notation (or JSON) provides a standardized data exchange format that is better-suited for Ajax-style web applications.

JSON is an open, text-based data exchange format (see RFC 4627). Like XML, it is human-readable, platform independent, and enjoys a wide availability of implementations. Data formatted according to the JSON standard is lightweight and can be parsed by JavaScript implementations with incredible ease, making it an ideal data exchange format for Ajax web applications. Since it is primarily a data format, JSON is not limited to just Ajax web applications, and can be used in virtually any scenario where applications need to exchange or store structured information as text.

(Source: msdn.microsoft.com)

The second trick is to stop thinking about yourself. While learning something new, many students will think, “Damn, this is hard for me. I wonder if I am stupid.” Because stupidity is such an unthinkably terrible thing in our culture, the students will then spend hours constructing arguments that explain why they are intelligent yet are having difficulties. The moment you start down this path, you have lost your focus.

I used to have a boss named Rock. Rock had earned a degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech and never had a job in which he used his knowledge of the heavens. Once I asked him whether he regretted getting the degree. “Actually, my degree in astrophysics has proved to be very valuable,” he said. “Some things in this world are just hard. When I am struggling with something, I sometimes think ‘Damn, this is hard for me. I wonder if I am stupid,’ and then I remember that I have a degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech; I must not be stupid.”

From Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition, by Aaron Hillegass

(Source: intelliot.com)

From Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition, by Aaron Hillegass.

You have to -release the name yourself.

(Source: stackoverflow.com)

DOM is document object model.

Wikipedia says this:

Web browsers usually use an internal model similar to the DOM in order to render a document (such as an HTML page). The DOM APIs are also used to inspect or modify a Web page from JavaScript code. In other words, the Document Object Model is the way JavaScript sees the browser state and the HTML page it contains.

When an HTML page is rendered in a browser, the browser parses the markup (e.g. HTML), downloaded from the web-server into an in-memory DOM. The DOM is used to construct additional internal structures used to display the page in the browser window.

The nodes of every document are organized in a tree structure, called the DOM tree. The topmost node in the DOM tree is the Document object.

And then AngularJS “[decouples] DOM manipulation from app logic”.

(Source: meetup.com)