It’s been a while since I have posted here, mostly because we are busy building things at Okta. In the past while I have been building our UI framework and generalizing UI components, and thought I should share some high level bullet points of my experience. 1. You are building a framework Unless you are building a small website, no matter if you…

A while back I wrote a blog post on coupling and the observer pattern. Looking back, I did a pretty poor job describing what it wrong about it. I will attempt to correct this. We all want simple and descriptive code. Code that is self documented. Code that makes sense, Code that tells us a story. Lets look at a kind of code I have seen many times…

One of the good things about Backbone.js is it doesn’t tell us how to do things. It leaves it for us to decide what are the best practices for writing views (or any components). This is also one of the worst things about Backbone. it makes it almost too easy to take the wrong path, and write views that will be hard to maintain. The principle we…

PubSub (or the observer pattern) is obviously the hottest pattern in client side development, and I would like to take a shot at trying to refine the best practices for using it in a flexible and robust way. The definition provided in the original Gang of Four book on Design Patterns states: “Define a one-to-many dependency between objects so that…

I ran into this old post by Jeff Atwood, that makes a good point. Reinventing the wheel is most probably the best way to learn about “wheels”, and about the problems they designed to solve. There is no better way to learn about anything than actually implementing it. However, consider a project that, say, 3 engineers are working on, and each one of…

Edit, 6/26/2012: This post is my personal rant about interview questions. If you got here looking for actual programming interview questions, I can recommend these books: Cracking the Coding Interview and Programming Interviews Exposed. These books helped many engineers getting their dream jobs. It’s no secret I’ve been in a bunch of of interviews…

I’m working on a project that includes writing a client for a fairly sophisticated RESTful API. To get some better understanding of both client and server RESTful philosophy I purchased and read RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby (O’Reilly Media, 2008). I tend to agree with the foreword by David Heinemeier Hansson: “Every…

For a quick assignment I was asked to write the following program: In the language of your choosing build an application that, given an English language document as input, builds a data structure capturing the count of each word in the document. Bonus: Create an inverted index as well: a mapping of the words to absolute positions in the document…