Here is a a really very detailed explanation (with examples) of how a program ends up going from code to an executable that your processor can run. This post details all of the steps along the way, from the original code, compiling, compiler optimizations, assembly, machine code, etc. The Birth and Death of a Running [...]

“How much does your framework choice affect performance? This site helps answer that question. We’ve compared the performance of baseline functionality in a variety of web application frameworks, each operating in a realistic production configuration. Results are captured on Amazon EC2 and on physical hardware. The project is still evolving, and as it does so, [...]

In the context of code reviews, are checklists useful? Do they work? How do you use them (if you do)? This article poses these questions and gives a couple of checklist examples used for code reviews. I personally prefer using checklists as they help remind me of the most important ‘big’ things to check for. [...]

What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with programming experience predict the exact output of ten small Python programs. We use subtle differences between program versions to demonstrate that seemingly [...]

“PHP is one unique language where the array data type has been highly generalized to suit a very broad set of use cases. For example, in PHP you can use an array to create both ordered lists as well as dicts (key/value pairs or maps) with a single data type. A PHP array isn’t an [...]

If you are a beginner to JavaScript you might find this article quite useful. It mentions a few common JavaScript quirks that you may not understand at first, including: details on the global namespace, the this object, knowing the difference between ECMAScript 3 and ECMAScript 5, asynchronous operations, prototypes, and simple JavaScript inheritance. Full Article: [...]

Here is a guide I just came across that seems to be a quite extensive resource for advanced HTML & CSS web development. It appears that the guide is sectioned into lessons, where a new lesson is posted each week. So you should be able to follow along at our own pace over time. From [...]

Google Chrome includes quite a few extremely useful tools for web developers. It can be somewhat overwhelming at first if you haven’t used them before. This article gives a quite comprehensive overview of the tools included and what they do. While reading this article keep in mind that new versions of Google Chrome are released [...]

Lately I’ve been reading up on various tools, methods, frameworks, etc. related to 3D programming in Java. Why Java? No real reason except that it is quite portable and somewhat straight forward to get started with. I’ve never actually done any real 3D development so this is a first! Check my my awesome purple square [...]

“High-level languages are not intrinsically slow! David Chisnall explains how programming in a low-level language can make a compiler’s job harder, essentially wasting effort and slowing down your program’s processing. The closer to the metal you can get while programming, the faster your program will compile — or so conventional wisdom would have you believe. [...]