Objects and the Prototype Chain

I'm a regular in the Stack Overflow JavaScript Room. Recently, one of the regulars started a room-wide blog, and asked for contributors. I figured "Why the hell not?" and decided to write a tutorial on Object-Oriented Programming in JavaScript.

Well, that's how it started. It got long, and I didn't even get to covering design patterns. So, I broke it up, and the first part is now available as Objects and the Prototype Chain. Check it out, give me some feedback, and maybe learn something.

Not How, But What

A happy developer is a productive developer. That fact should be obvious to everybody who interacts with a developer of any sort.

Developer happiness is affected by a lot of things. The work environment, the projects they are given, their managers, the flexibility of their schedules, and the quality of their tools. This last one is very important. If a developer doesn't like the tools they are using, it's a safe bet they won't be happy, and thus won't be as productive as they could be.

GMScreen

GMScreen is a pet project of mine. Like all pet projects, it started out as a tool for myself. When running pencil-and-paper Role Playing Games, I often found that the tools I was using for notes, initiative order, and combat modifiers were just insufficient.

Styling By IDs: Case In Point

There has been some argument in the web development community about styling HTML by IDs. Arguments against styling by ID include specificity (IDs are hard to override), and, more importantly, code reuse.

I Was Wrong

I mean, I was right… the first time.

When I first started working on SlickText, I converted the code that the CEO/Designer had written such that it would use Smarty templates. It was the right way to do things. However, he pushed back, saying it was “too complex”, and I caved and reverted back to the PHP/HTML files and output buffering that he was using previously.