Being Programmers

I wrote a guest post over on Recoding: Being Programmers

It's about frustration, learning, teaching, and being good at what we do. Check it out.

Solved Problems

Recently, I read an interview with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., the company that puts out the ubiquitous tech books with the animals on the front (and, oddly enough, a great cookbook). O'Reilly facilitated the open-source movement, as well as the "maker" movement, through publishing technical manuals, and through hosting conferences and summits. In short, he gave us a way to talk about community engineering, programming, and creating in general. A banner under which "makers" can unite.

I consider myself a maker. I enjoy problem solving, especially in concrete ways. When I come up with a website, a service, or even just some snippet of code that people can use (even if they don't), it's a rush. I've written about this "superhero" feeling before.

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.

Scope In JavaScript

... is a little crazy. It's not a normal kind of scope by any means, though once you think about it, it's not too hard to understand. All you really have to remember is JavaScript uses function scope, not block scope, and anything not specifically declared in a function is technically in the global scope. That can be confusing to wrap your head around, but here are some examples to help out.