JavaScript appreciation and more

Posted on by Chris

I’ve been up to a lot of little things recently but haven’t undertaken any projects big enough to warrant a whole fancy blog post. I figured I might as well summarize what I’ve been up to.

I’m doing a project at school that improves the experience of on-campus tutors and their clients. They’d been using Moodle workshops to allow clients to submit content to tutors, and recording hours manually on timecards. Moodle will still be involved, but the tutors will now interact primarily with a web application I’ve been coding that will track their hours for them, as well as fulfill some clerical roles, such as preventing two tutors from working on the same paper. (Previously this was done more or less manually by updating the workshop submission title. Not a terribly fun way to track that kind of stuff.)

This project has me up to my neck in JavaScript, a language I’ve long held in contempt. However, after reading up on some patterns and watching a talk or two my mind has been completely changed. In fact, I enjoy coding in JavaScript now. I enjoy it a lot. When you know what you are doing (and what to avoid) all the frustration and general icky feelings associated with working in the language disappear. What’s left is an incredibly pure, lightning-fast web application. A maintainable one too. Who knew JavaScript could do that?

Some other semi-random facts:

  • I’m getting married in 91 days. (See that counter in the right column? Yup, that one. If you’ve been wondering what that’s counting down to, now you know.)
  • I’ve recently revived the RTS gaming genre on my system by reinstalling Age of Empires 3. I don’t recall why I stopped playing, but I shouldn’t have.
  • In case anyone wonders why I haven’t been on WoW for a while, it’s because I let my subscription expire. That was over six months ago, I think. Honestly I have not missed it. There are more fun games out there, and they don’t require a monthly fee. Team Fortress 2 is an especially good option if you like class-based games and first-person shooters.

That’s all for now, I guess. Stay tuned for some more developments on Banshee.OpenVP in the coming weeks.

3 Replies to “JavaScript appreciation and more”

  1. I agree. JavaScript has matured beyond the evil it was when I first started in web development. I think in some communities there is still a major stigma. I attended a recent web developer group here in Raleigh and the majority seemed to still have strong negative feelings about its use.

    The truth is, with frameworks like jQuery it’s dirt simple to write clean unobtrusive behavior code and it makes writing it a joy.

    Case in point, I took a 30 line inline javascript function that incorrectly counted the number of words in a textarea. In just a few minutes I was able to rewrite it as 3 lines of jQuery code.

Comments are closed.