The crew from Upside posted a short interview with me on the Upside blog.

Read the full post at gainupside.com >>

Here is a video of a presentation I gave at the STLJS meetup on January 16th, 2014 entitled Test-Driven JavaScript with Jasmine. The source code for the demo is on my GitHub page here and the slides are here

The second in a series of articles I wrote about Internet marketing has been published by Techli. Why (most) SEO is a scam.

Read the full article at Techli.com >>

• The coming tech-lash – The Economist
• Datensparsamkeit – Martin Fowler on data privacy
• Micro optimising web content for unexpected, wild success – Troy Hunt
• Digital Marketing And Analytics: Two Ladders For Magnificent Success – Avinash Kaushik
• Google blows up email marketing – Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica
• Maybe Monads Might Not Matter – Room 101
• What’s wrong with CS research – Classic from 2007 by Mencius Moldbug
• The Ugly American Programmer – Classic from 2007 by Jeff Atwood

Internet marketing is deceptively difficult. While it’s true that all of your customers are only a click away, small businesses often discover that breaking their way into the search engine results pages and stealing clicks from their entrenched competitors is an insurmountable task. The truth is that search engine marketing leads to natural monopolies and there aren’t many alternative channels through which smaller retailers and media companies can stake out territory.

Read the full article at Techli.com >>

• The Internet Mystery that has the World Baffled
• Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolfram’s utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm
• Efficient Techniques for Fuzzy and Partial matching in MongoDB
• Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Classic post from 2000 by Joel Spolsky

Great series on new paradigms in object-oriented and functional programming by Anthony Ferrara

• Beyond Design Patterns
• Beyond Inheritance
• Beyond Object-Oriented Programming
• Beyond Clean Code

There are too many programming languages. What I mean to say is there are too many good programming languages. Behavior psychologists have long warned about the curse of choice – the theory that too much choice causes anxiety and negatively affects decision making. We in the software world suffer from a severe form of that. We’re literally drowning in options, all of which are good.

Do you remember that myth from the late nineties about the great technology convergence where all software development converges onto one platform built with one programming language? Java was supposed to be the write once run anywhere language and we were all supposed to use it for everything. The first mobile apps were Java apps running on those old Nokia phones with the little green and black screens. Client-side web was supposed to move entirely to Java applets. Even software embedded into devices – like copy machines – was supposed to be written in Java, because we all know that managed memory code is great for copy machines. I can picture it now: the garbage collector kicks in while your copies are being made and they all come out smeared.

Now the development landscape is more fragmented than ever and becoming more so. And that’s a problem because it makes hiring and training significantly harder. The proliferation of new languages and frameworks is watering down the talent pool for the most popular languages, and among the new languages there seems to be no clear winner. Myth busted.