I picked up a phrase some time ago that I think applies: “The next big thing is always beneath contempt.” Implication being that it is, of course, until it isn’t. Until it’s too big to ignore. This has happened over and over again in our society. In the middle ages, people assumed that no serious discussion could happen in anything but Latin — the so-called “vulgar” languages had no merit.

Our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.org means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

History.js gracefully supports the HTML5 History/State APIs (pushState, replaceState, onPopState) in all browsers. Including continued support for data, titles, replaceState. Supports jQuery, MooTools and Prototype.

The team at Double Fine kindly filmed a video covering the reasons behind their choice of Moai and showing some of the very earliest Double Fine Adventure development prototypes.

Rails controllers violate the Single Responsibility Principle. Each “action” has a different responsibility and should be contained in a separate object.

An object essentially wraps up method dispatch and state

Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules, usually beginning through a system of democratic voting.

You've heard of Browser Detection and Feature Detection. Form Factor Detection is a third way, providing an avenue to manage conceptually distinct user interfaces. It doesn't eliminate the need for the first two approaches, but you use them in the context of a particular form factor's interface.

When a message is sent to a Smalltalk-80 object, the method dictionaries associated with that object's class and its superclasses are searched at runtime. If none of these classes implement a method for a given message, the Smalltalk virtual machine sends the object the message doesNotUnderstand:. The original message selector and message arguments are bundled together in a Message object and passed as the argument to doesNotUnderstand:. The default method for this message is stored in class Object. This method invokes the Smalltalk debugger, since sending an object a message it does not implement is usually a sign of programmer error. However, objects that override doesNotUnderstand: can intercept unimplemented message at runtime, and process them as they see fit.

The comfortable minimum size of tappable UI elements is 44 x 44 points.

Implementation inheritance... is a bad idea that makes software harder to manage and reuse. It binds the implementations of classes together so that neither class can be understood without the other: a subclass cannot be understood without knowing how the inherited methods are implemented in its superclass, and a superclass cannot be understood without knowing how its methods are inherited in subclasses. In a complex class hierarchy, no individual class can be understood without understanding all the other classes in the hierarchy.

Nonetheless, object oriented programming does provide at least two useful features. The first is encapsulation: objects combine together data and code in a way that hides implementation details. The second useful feature is interface inheritance, which refers to classes that provide the same methods and APIs even though they have different implementations. This makes the classes interchangeable, which encourages reuse.

The Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. You can pull just what you need from a large set of reusable UI widgets and controls, and from lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and more.