Month: November 2017

What’s the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?

Here’s a good explanation on what’s the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript. I know I’m not the only one confused.

Chicken or the egg

A confusing bit of history is that JavaScript was created in 1996. It was then submitted to Ecma International in 1997 for standardization, which resulted in ECMAScript. At the same time, because JavaScript conformed to the ECMAScript specification, JavaScript is an example of an ECMAScript implementation.

That leaves us with this fun fact: ECMAScript is based on JavaScript, and JavaScript is based on ECMAScript.

I know.

It sounds exactly like the time-travel trope of people being their own parent — a little wonky, but kind of fun to think about.

JSON5 – JSON for Humans

JSON5 specification looks like a much more useful JSON, especially for those of us who are still more human than machine. Here are some of the improvements:

Objects and arrays can have trailing commas.
Strings can be single-quoted.
Strings can have line breaks.
Numbers can be signed, begin or end with a decimal point, and also in base 16.
Inline and block comments are supported.

Here’s an example:

{
    foo: 'bar',
    while: true,

    this: 'is a \
multi-line string',

    // this is an inline comment
    here: 'is another', // inline comment

    /* this is a block comment
       that continues on another line */

    hex: 0xDEADbeef,
    half: .5,
    delta: +10,
    to: Infinity,   // and beyond!

    finally: 'a trailing comma',
    oh: [
        "we shouldn't forget",
        'arrays can have',
        'trailing commas too',
    ],
}

I have never particularly liked Virtual Private Networking (VPN). From the old days, when there were a gadzillion of proprietary implementations, each being super slow, resource hungry, and requiring a mess of versions specific requirements, like Java and Firefox. Secure Shell (SSH) has always been my choice for remote connections and tunneling.

Today I came across this article, which also shows that SSH tunnels are much faster than OpenVPN (if one has to use VPN, OpenVPN is probably the best choice around). Needless to say they are also much easier to setup, both manually and automatically.

This adds yet another argument to my SSH vs VPN toolbox.

hack {cyprus} summit 2017

Last week I’ve attended the first ever hack {cyprus } summit. hack {cyprus} is well known among techies in Cyprus for organizing other events, mostly hackatons. They are good at that. And this time it was something new.

The event itself was excellent! It had all the usual things you’d expect from such a gathering – a bunch of bearded guys in dark t-shirts and jeans (each one secretly wishing that there were more women in tech), gadgets, coffee, snacks, and so on and so on. And there were talks and workshops with lots of chatter in between.

Being a big fan and a frequent attendee of technical conferences all over Europe, I knew there was no chance I’d miss this one in Cyprus. Even if I have to drive from Limassol to Nicosia. In fact, I decided I’ll get even more value of it – practice my public speaking and presentation skills at the expense of the crowd. So when the call for talks was announced, I submitted a couple of talks and one was picked.

There was a little hickup where I didn’t know the time slot of the talk (how long it would be), so I submitted two talks – one for 30 minutes or so, and one for 60 minutes. The 60 minute one got chosen, and then I learned that the time I have is 20 minutes for the talk and 10 minutes for the Q&A. Oopsy. But, never the less, challenge accepted. It took a lot of cutting and trimming but I think I sort of managed to get the essence of it into about 20 slides. My talk wasn’t the first one of the day, so I observed other speakers. I think most of them went slightly over 20 minutes and cut into the Q&A time, but on the other hand, there weren’t enough questions for most of the talks to fill all that time. So in the end, it all worked out pretty well. If I remember correctly, I managed to squeeze my talk into about 25 minutes altogether. I’d love to see the video of that – there’s plenty of mistakes to learn from there, but for now, there are only the slides.

Evolution of deploy.sh from Leonid Mamchenkov

I would like to say huge thank you to everybody involved – organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees. It was a blast and I hope to attend many more.