Leonid Mamchenkov - Life, universe, and everything else

7 Skills Of An Effective Developer

“7 Skills Of An Effective Developer” is a great article that goes over what it takes to become an effective developer. The choice of skills is rather standard and has been covered in other articles before:

Communication
Empathy
Planning
Presentation
Documentation
Testing
Git

but I really liked the examples that were used to illustrate them – simple, yet very realistic.

css-purge – CSS cleaner

css-purge is a tool that does the following:

A CSS tool written in Node JS as a command line app or library for the purging, burning, reducing, shortening, compressing, cleaning, trimming and formatting of duplicate, extra, excess or bloated CSS.

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',
    ],
}