We can’t front-load complexity and let people sort it out. That way lies madness. We must distill the rules down so that people can be effective, and help them along their journey towards JavaScript mastery. It’s a learning curve, not a learning cliff.

clever code is just never worth it

Do you ever find yourself looking at code that you have absolutely no recollection of writing? #disturbing #codeblackout

An example Backbone application contributed by Jérôme Gravel-Niquet. This demo uses a simple LocalStorage adapter to persist Backbone models within your browser.

No, to me, code is inventory. It is stuff lying around and it has substantial cost of ownership. It might do us good to consider what we can do to minimize it.

I think that the future belongs to organizations that learn how to strategically delete code. Many companies are getting better at cutting unprofitable features in their products, but the next step is to pull those features out by the root: the code. Carrying costs are larger than we think. There's competitive advantage for companies that recognize this.

To this I have one just piece of advice: they can go to hell. The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out. When they treat you like this, just remember that this is your journey, not theirs. Being different is not a crime, and people who tell you it is are just jealous that you have picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire.

You can code. They cannot. That is pretty damn cool.

The programming website Project Euler provides a plan for how to learn anything in fun, discrete steps

Mike Lee considers that a software engineer makes great applications not because he follows good rules but because he has a better way of looking at the world and he learns from experience.

The Deconstructed series is designed to visually and interactively deconstruct the internal code of JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Prototype and MooTools.

It breaks the physical JavaScript into visual blocks that you can easiliy navigate. Each block opens to reveal its internal code. Clickable hyperlinks allow you to follow program flow.

JavaScript is the main client-side scripting language used by many of Google's open-source projects. This style guide is a list of dos and don'ts for JavaScript programs.

If you have ever given a presentation on any aspect of programming (or webdesign), you may have felt the need to embed some source code (formatted and syntax highlighted to be easily readable) in Keynote. Your options have traditionally been limited:

I was riding my exercise bike, listening to Stack Overflow #38 when I heard Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky say “Quality just doesn’t matter that much.” I nearly fell off my bike.

I mean this is Joel Spolsky right? His buddy Jeff makes this incredibly dumb statement and Joel grunts his approval. WTF?

A lot of programmers feel like being asked to go to a code review is like being told by mom to eat our veggies. We'll complain about it, and even if we do eventually swallow them we're determined not to enjoy them.

With this I’m assuming you have a bit of familiarity with the iPhone SDK - you can download it for free from Apple’s site, and follow along here. We’re going to build an RSS feed reader for a simple feed (from The Apple Blog, no less).