This blog post is a summary of the talk “The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz (he has also written a book about it).

Faceted navigation is an efficient way of exploring a set of entities via the values of their attributes. You have probably already used it, maybe without knowing its name. For example, with a music program or on a shopping website. This post explains what faceted navigation is and what benefits it brings.

Tom DeMarco has written some great books (“Peopleware” is one of my “Eight important books for software developers”). Thus, I was excited to have the opportunity to hear him speak. The following is a summary of a talk Tom DeMarco gave at the OOP Conference in Munich, on Jan 26, 2011. Comments in square brackets are mine.

Update 2012-01-22: “JavaScript myth: JavaScript needs a standard bytecode” is an updated version of this blog post.

The web and thus JavaScript is slowly turning into a great platform. Part of the allure of the (partially) competing Java platform is that it has a core that goes beyond “Java the language”: The Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There are now many languages that target the JVM, for example: Groovy, JRuby, Fantom, Jython, Scala, ABCL, Clojure, and Gosu. Java class files store JVM programs as Java bytecode, a compact binary format that source code is compiled to. Does JavaScript have something similar?

In this post, I present a short example that should explain the basics of jQuery Templates and quickly get you started. It also demonstrates a technique to cleanly handle separators between array elements. This technique applies to many other templating engines, so read on even if you don’t plan on using jQuery Templates.

In this post, I give an overview over JavaScript HTML templating and list a few elegant solutions. I’ll also say which one I ended up choosing for a project of mine.

Big companies often use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Such a network consists of servers spread all over the world that all host the same content which ensures fast delivery. Some CDNs also host popular JavaScript libraries for the public, for free. Dave Ward gives three reasons why you might want to use such hosted libraries instead of storing them next to your own code:

Marco Arment explains how InstaPaper works its magic. In case you don’t know: InstaPaper has a bookmarklet that, when clicked on, uploads the current web page to the InstaPaper server. Afterwards, the page can be downloaded by one of the InstaPaper apps for offline reading. Naively, you would expect the bookmarklet to send the URL of the current page to the InstaPaper server which would then crawl the contents of the page. But that would not work with sites where you need to log in. Thus, Arment implemented the following hack.