Are you a programmer who is considering learning JavaScript, but unsure whether it is worth the pain? Then this blog post is for you: I argue that it is worth it and give tips for surviving the language.

Facebook’s React has an optional language extension that enables you to embed HTML inside JavaScript. This extension can make your code more concise, but it also breaks compatibility with the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. ECMAScript 6 will have template strings [^1], which enable you to implement JSX (or something close to it) inside the language. Jonathan Raphaelson has done so and the result looks as follows.

The videos of the Google I/O 2014 talks have been online for a while now. Three of them are about Web Components and Polymer. This blog post briefly describes what they are about and mentions a few highlights, which may help you to decide which videos you want to watch.

I traveled quite a bit recently and got exposed to a negative aspect of current technology: Things work well if you have a solid internet connection with no traffic limits and are plugged into a power outlet. Otherwise, things do not work well at all. This blog post describes the problems that arise and suggests solutions.

Recently, I was shopping for a presenter (a remote control for PowerPoint, Keynote, etc.) and liked the Logitech Presenter R700 (a newer European-only version of the R800) best, due to its design and its integrated display with a countdown. Alas, Macs are not officially supported for this device. Thankfully, they can be made to work together, as explained in this blog post. I also mention how my configuration file can be adapted to an R800.

Web apps have been around for a while, but the ability to install them as if they were native apps is relatively new. This blog post takes a look at what’s currently possible.

Python’s SimpleHTTPServer is the classic quick solution for serving the files in a directory via HTTP (often, you’ll access them locally, via localhost). This is useful, because there are some things that don’t work with file: URLs in web browsers.

“Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start” by Laura Hudson describes how online abuse was curbed in the battle-arena game League of Legends, published by Riot Games. The following insight is interesting:

Electrolysis (e10s) [^1] is a project to add a one-process-per-tab architecture (similar to Google Chrome’s) to Firefox. It was put on hold [^2] in early 2012 and is now being resumed.