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Javascript tip of the day

Javascript has a delete operator! Okay maybe that’s not news for people who do more frontend work than I do, but I was surprised to learn that. If you have a javascript object and want to remove one of its properties, it’s really easy. All you need to do is delete object.property. There’s more detail here if you’re interested. Now if only it wasn’t such a hassle to iterate over an object’s properties…

Ember tip of the day

Lately I’ve been working with Ember components, which are really pretty cool. For anyone who doesn’t know, in Ember components let you encapsulate layout and functionality neatly together so you can reuse things all over your app without making a huge mess.

Ember components have a lifecycle you should know about and a set of lifecycle hooks you can call. Those hooks are really handy, they let you do all kinds of things at different points in the component’s lifecycle. Be warned, though: you MUST call

this.super()

at the beginning of your lifecycle hook or your component will break in deeply weird ways. When you implement a lifecycle hook in your code, you’re actually overriding a method in the base Ember component. If you don’t call this.super(), the original function doesn’t get called and shockingly enough, it does a bunch of things that are necessary to make your component work right :)

Because Ember is open source, you can go have a look at what the base lifecycle functions do. Here’s the init function, which calls this.super() itself before it does the rest of its setup. Reading the code yourself totally isn’t necessary, but it’s interesting and might help you remember why it’s so important to call this.super().

Javascript tip of the day

If you write javascript, you probably use console.log() all the time. The other day I stumbled across this video (quite possible in javascript weekly, a newsletter I recommend if you work in javascript regularly) with a really great and very simple tip: if you’re logging an object that contains other objects, use console.table() instead. I didn’t know that was a thing! It gives you really nice easy to read output in the form of, you guessed it, a table :)

Here’s the video so you can see what I’m talking about:

How javascript is like a board game

Javascript is much more like a board game than you might think. Let me tell you a story to explain what I mean.

I used to be convinced I just didn’t like board games. I’d played the usual Snakes and Ladders, Sorry, Risk and Monopoly as a kid, and I could happily go without playing any of them ever again. Especially Monopoly. At least the other ones had an end in sight, even in Risk there was the hope of a quick and merciful rout, but Monopoly always seemed to end with people forfeiting just to get the game over with.

Then friends of mine started introducing me to board games that didn’t suck. Games like Clue and Red November and Space Alert and Ticket to Ride. It turns out I like board games after all, I just don’t like shitty board games.

Javascript, as it turns out, is remarkably similar. I used to think javascript just sucked, then I started working with ember. It turns out I don’t hate javascript after all, I just hate shitty javascript. All of the javascript I’d worked with pre-ember was a totally structureless mess – which I freely admit was partially my own fault. The vast majority of my programming experience is in java using frameworks like struts and spring which enforce a lot of structure. Server devs, myself included, don’t always know what to do without a framework enforcing some structure on our code.

Ember is an extremely opinionated framework, which as a veteran of rigid java frameworks I find comforting and familiar :) It also takes quite a few architecture decisions out of the developer’s hands, which is tremendously helpful if you’re a server dev with no interest in reinventing the wheel. Ember certainly isn’t the right choice for every single project, but it works very well in the context I’ve used it in and lets me get my front end tasks done quickly so I can go back to the server side development I prefer.

The moral of the story, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is that before you decide something sucks make sure you’re not just using it wrong.