This year’s WWDC was a big surprise for anyone following Apple. But the biggest surprise was the new language called Swift. Apple has managed to create a whole new language that borrows heavily from many other languages but eventually is something unlike anything out there. The syntax may be similar but there unique characteristics to the language that are not out there in any other language. One of these is the fact that Swift is completely compatible with Objective-C. It uses the same APIs and in fact you can use both languages in the same project. It is then but natural for lots of people to directly compare Swift with Objective-C. Others have also compared Swift to Go, Scala, F, C etc.

I’m here to compare it to Javascript. Going over the language, I see the many similarities. And even in places where the languages are very different, there are ways where Swift can be written in a...

CSS is the language developers love to hate. This is mostly because of the inconsistent syntax. But many fail to recognize the power of modern CSS. I’m here to give an example of CSS power that may very well blow your mind. As an additional bonus, this technique can be used to provide a better first load experience for Angular apps and can be a fix for its SEO problems that are often hard to fix without some sort of server setup.

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing :target

:target is a special pseudo selector in CSS that helps you change the style of something that is currently the target — the hash address in the URL matches its id. It sounds harder than it is so let me jump straight into an example, but first, a little recap about the hash address in browsers.

Consider, a static website, say, an FAQ page. All the questions are at top, followed by all the answers. You want users who...

Eval is Evil. Douglas Crockford has made that so popular that any competent Javascript developer thinks twice before actually using eval. But when do we even need to use eval?

Sometime we need to actually affect the webpage by evaluating a string. Those are cases when there is no way around eval. However, in most cases, eval is usually used for testing, and providing an interactive coding experience in the browser for tutorials, demos and the like.

I recently ran into the problem while developing Imprezzive. Imprezzive is a modern web-based presentation framework that has been tailored especially for real-time editing and collaboration and sharing code samples.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish with Imprezzive was to provide a text editor within the slides where you could actually run the code and see the results. This is very useful for presenting code samples and showing...

I have long preferred Bash over Zsh for one simple reason. Speed. Zsh, with all its awesome features is just the tiniest amount slower than Bash. And with some good dotfiles, you can pimp out your bash to work great. I have used Paul Irish’s dotfiles for my Mac for the last couple of years.

Paul Irish has dotfiles that are tailor-made for a mac. Apart from the obvious goodies like syntax highlight, z jumps, and the obvious aliases, they also include script files to install common packages, and some seriously funny aliases, and useful little functions.

Two of my favourites:

• please : a much better alternative to using sudo
• c : a super awesome cat replacement with syntax highlighting

But one feature pushed me over the edge — autosuggestions. Here’s a demo:

If there is one thing faster than quick keyboard shortcuts, its not typing at all. Once I saw this, I had to have it. I...

Sublime Text is hands-down the most popular text editor among web developers. Arguably, it’s also the best. The Vim and Emacs aficionados will argue that once you master their editor of choice, your productivity goes through the roof compared to GUI text editors. I argue that while Vim and Emacs have steep learning curves and take weeks if not months or years to master, Sublime is easy to learn and you can get running within days. Moreover, with awesome plugins, endless and customizable keyboard shortcuts, you can get as productive, if not more as you would with vim and emacs. Not to start a flame war, but it’s true. (Yes, Sublime text supports the regex based find and replace etc.)

At any rate, there are definitely similarities between Sublime Text and other text editors. First and foremost, you need to set it up to make it awesome. Here are a set of steps to get there.

Step 1 -

My introduction to javascript began, like many other people, with jQuery. For a while, javascript and the DOM seemed like the same thing. Later, as I learnt what javascript really was, I started to use and appreciate tools such as Underscore.

Soon, I discovered Lazy.js which seemed like a much better way to do things. Still, Underscore, Low-Dash and Lazy were essentially tools for dealing with existing collections. The Range Class from Ruby seemed like a breadth of fresh air in comparison.

Wouldn’t it be better if instead of storing actual values in a collection, we could just store a formula (or function) that could generate those values. Wouldn’t it be even better if we didn’t have to have a limit on the number elements we could generate.

Using my new love, Generators, I tried to solve the problem of dealing with infinite sequences with a library I call Grunge.js

Grunge.js is part...

My new found love for promises is well documented on this very blog. Once you start using promises, it’s hard to go back. It is also very easy to forget the challenges in understanding promises in the first place.

I recently came across this article that talked about how node should have been built on top of promises to begin with, and how they missed a huge opportunity by going with callbacks.

Now, while I love the promises, considering the sort of steep learning curve, I still see value in callbacks and libraries like Async.

One of the places where I find Promises to be extremely limiting is when dealing with events. Promises can only be resolved once. They become useless for dealing with streams and events. (The progress event can be used here, but it’s an optional part of the Promises/A+ spec, and many libraries don’t even implement it)

On the flip side, it is kind of a bummer...

fs.readFile("myFile.txt", function(err, fileContents){
  if(!!err) {
    throw Error(err)
    return;
  }
  myConvertFile(fileContents, function(err, newContents){
    if(!!err){
      throw Error(err);
      return;
    }
    fs.writeFile('myNewFile.txt', newFileContents, function(err, saved){
      if(!!err){
        throw Error(err);
        return;
      }
      console.log("YAY! SAVED FILE!");
    }
  }
});

Don’t write your code like that.

Just don’t.

Node.js is fairly new, but javascript developers have been dealing with Callback Hell for more than a millennia now. Learning from history and after traversing the far reaches of the inter-webs I have looked for the many ways to deal with the pyramid of doom. Here are my findings:

Past Tense : Named Functions

Javascript lets you have many anonymous functions. They can be immensely powerful. But, even more importantly, it lets...

People new to Javascript get tripped up by it’s ‘strange’ Event Loop. It may feel like that Javascript is inconsistent, slow and inefficient. SetTimeouts, take a time, but animations based on SetTimeouts can be unreliable, and it doesn’t have predictable time.

What gives?

Well, it is well understood with the idea of a giant infinite loop wrapping your entire javascript program. It goes down executing each statement and expression in your code. Anything wrapped in a setTimeout is skipped however, and marked to be executed ‘later’.

setTimeout(<some function>,1000);

I use an ambiguous word like ‘later’ on purpose. Even though we put in 1000 milliseconds, the function may not be executed exactly 1000 milliseconds later. But it will take at least 1000 milliseconds for it to start executing. The idea is that the javascript event loop checks back after every iteration, and if the given...

If you’re a javascript developer, you’ve probably used underscore (or lo-dash). Underscore is an amazing library that really helps keep your code functional, and provides a whole bunch of simple methods to keep your code ‘for-loop-free’.

Underscore can really help keep your code terse, and minimal. However, sometimes, it can be wasteful in terms of CPU cycles. In other words, it could be faster.

There are a few ways that code can be made faster while solving a problem:

1. Using a faster algorithm.
2. Improving the code that implements your algorithm.

But there is another way to make your code faster that many people seem to overlook. (usually rightly so):

• Only solving a subset of the original problem.

That, in a few short words, is what I think is the philosophy of Lazy.js. ‘Be lazy, and do as little work as possible.

Take this for an example. Let’s say you want to pass an array and...