I recently had a developer on my team who had some trouble with jQuery’s $(…).data() syntax. In case anyone else has trouble, maybe I can clarify things a bit. I’m anonymizing all the code involved, of course. We wanted to make certain items have certain behaviors under certain circumstances. And so we set up a “whatToDo” […]
Tag Archives: teaching
When Your Computer Catches Fire
Sunday, November 13th, 2011 – 2:12 pm
Occasionally, I amuse myself by reading Not Always Right. I really shouldn’t, as it’s always bad for my opinion of humanity, but sometimes I just can’t look away. And occasionally, it clues me in to a teachable moment. Like this one, which recently appeared there: Caller: “My computer is a fire risk.” Me: “What makes you say that?” […]
About Amy Hoy
Thursday, March 24th, 2011 – 8:07 am
When I was moving beyond self-written AJAX calls and picking up the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries, one of the best resources I could find was Amy Hoy’s Scriptaculous cheat sheet. It was hard not to find it — or her: Google searches on the things I was dealing with at the time just kept leading back […]
Typesetting In Between the Letters
Saturday, July 10th, 2010 – 11:50 am
Long before I learned to program — and long before the World-Wide Web was even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye — I was introduced to typography by Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas. In his chapter “Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity”, Hofstadter presents a full-page figure that shows 56 different versions of the […]
On Complexity Versus Efficiency
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 – 6:39 pm
I sometimes imagine how I would teach certain concepts, if I were put in charge of a class. (Not just in programming, either; many people who know me have said I’d make a great teacher; perhaps I’ve taken it to heart.) One of the concepts in programming that I feel has a particularly poor “ease-of-teaching […]