No team is immune to the unexpected. Sooner or later, a large project will land on your desk out of the blue and a shift in focus seems inevitable.| Hugh F D Jackson
Data-focused teams can stand out in businesses as strange - especially those managing big data sets. Why do they take so much longer to deliver features or bug fixes than the web team? Why does transforming historical data take weeks, where major changes to a user journey can take half the time?| Hugh F D Jackson
In all development teams, consistently delivering valuable work is a struggle. In data-focused teams, doubly so. The why can be subtle, and change from team to team.| Hugh F D Jackson
This work is part of a joint project with Staffordshire University. It wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Claire Gwinnett, Andrew Jackson, Jolien Casteele, Zoe Jones and Mohamed Sedky.| Hugh F D Jackson
It’s been two and a half years since I wrote Why Curry Helps - a little love letter to the power of using curried functions in JavaScript. It’s easily my most-read post, bringing in hundreds of readers every month.| Hugh F D Jackson
One of the papers that’s grabbed my attention recently is “Idempotent Distributed Counters using a Forgetful Bloom Filter” by Rajath Subramanyam et. al. In it, the authors tackle a surprisingly tricky problem: how do you make distributed counters more accurate?| Hugh F D Jackson
In the last post, we took a deep-dive into the syntax of JavaScript’s new arrow functions. It’s great to see a new language feature that’s able to remove so much boilerplate from an idiomatic ES5 example.| Hugh F D Jackson
The next version of JavaScript - called ES2015 (née ES6) - has just shipped. It’s final, so there won’t be any semantic or syntactic changes. What there will be are plenty of great features that coming to a JavaScript engine near you. Soon.| Hugh F D Jackson
Sometimes I hear JavaScript dev throw around the terms vars and values as synonyms for each other. Realising that they’re not was a serious ‘aha’ moment for me - and making the distinction about it can make talking and thinking about code clearer by far.| Hugh F D Jackson
Objects and methods are a big deal. They’re the core way in which JavaScript defines functionality against a type; which is reflected in the standard library, in many of the libraries we choose to use, and how production code tends to be written (at least, in my experience).| Hugh F D Jackson
Doug Crockford’s JSLint performs static analysis on Javascript, returning a list of what Crockford considers to be violations of best practice. Contrary to the assertions of its creator, however, it is not a fit tool by which to judge the quality of 3rd party code.| Hugh F D Jackson
Prototypal inheritance is a brilliantly simple concept. Javascript’s syntax, however, often confuses new-comers. Let’s solve that, ehy?| Hugh F D Jackson
A programmer’s pipe-dream is to write code, and be able to use it repeatedly with little effort. It’s expressive because you write in a way that expresses what is needed, and it’s reuse because.. well, you’re reusing. What more could you want?| Hugh F D Jackson