Jerome Covington

javascript

JavaScript, Bill Evans, and the universal mind

I will always be a musician. And I will always hold the music of jazz pianist Bill Evans dear. Like most great jazz musicians that I love to listen to, not only could he play elegantly, but he could speak eloquently. There was a great session of his playing and

Featured

Separation of concerns in HTML/CSS/JS

I probably get in the most trouble when I fight with the front end. When I work with it in the way it is designed to work, I am a happier man. But with so many approaches, libraries, methodologies and frameworks, is it becoming more and more challenging to see

inspiration

Creation Myths

The more I work and think about web development, the more I think that the mystical, magical state of starting from zero and creating an innovative language, framework or web app "from scratch" is a well cultivated, but false, myth. Everything starts from something, and the ability to

inspiration

Return to Atlantis

A lot of developers my age who grew up in the states probably, like me, grew up with the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of R.A. Montgomery. As I learned how to program games using BASIC, Mr. Montgomery's special blend of mind-expanding interactive fiction made

javascript

Making Small Changes to Solve Big Problems

Do I have an affinity for JavaScript, because it is the first programming language that I learned at a respectable level of detail? Or is there more to it? I think there is. So much of what I like about contemporary JavaScript development hinges on thinking on a small scale,

process

Web Development: Process and Product

It seems to me, that my workflow benefits most from a posture focused on the process of web development, rather than exclusively the set of deliverables that compose a final product. It seems that this is not a unique point of view. But it does seem that focusing on the

javascript

Creating a Jasmine Test Runner in JSBin

Just a quick update here. A typical set up for testing front end code using Jasmine involves creating a test runner page with CSS and JS assets. To quickly set up a test runner using JSBin, I decided to write the CSS asset into the HTML using JavaScript, for a

javascript

A Long Time Ago in an Associative Array

Underscore [http://underscorejs.org/docs/underscore.html] has been making my life easier, and I've been explaining the Star Wars pantheon to my son so often, that it was unavoidable that the two should at some point intersect. So I thought I'd give a few simple

javascript

Head in the Clouds

Although I'm not ready to make the project public yet, I've been working on something I'm calling CZR (Caesar), which is a script that you can include on your page that allows fellow developers, designers or other site stakeholders to up-vote, down-vote and comment

process

Lessons in Jugaad

This article [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/business/international/from-india-proof-that-a-trip-to-mars-doesnt-have-to-break-the-bank.html] from the New York Times is great. Here are a few takeaways which translate from the world of space exploration on the cheap, to web development. 1. "Ours is a contrasting, inexpensive and innovative approach to

specifications

The DOM Platform and the Demise of HTML5

About a week ago, this commit [https://github.com/whatwg/dom/commit/89b5f1d8dd02ec458dd99ed82a3a005c8650c31c] was made to the WHATWG DOM Platform spec. For some developers, the sounding of HTML5's death knell may come not a moment too soon. HTML5, with the native browser functionality and semantics that it brought,

Turn Up the Signal, Wipe Out the Noise

Too many people working with code neglect the "I" in "IT". The tenets of Information Science hold true in our profession. Signal vs. noise is the name of the game. Is it insignificant that a project like Sass provides us the option to eliminate "noisy&

process

You Can't Force Open Source

I've been inadvertently living off of the progress made by the open source community for my entire career as a web developer. And while I haven't given back nearly as much as I should, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about "what

javascript

This Front End Ops Animal

Up front, this blog post would not exist without the amazing work and progress towards pushing the Front End Ops agenda by such trailblazers as Wesley Hales and Ryan Bridges, who gave a cool talk at the Velocity 2013 conference in Santa Clara, California. Of course there are countless awesome

process

An Open Stack, from Top to Bottom

What would it mean for all of us to use an open stack, from top to bottom? Once we loose our paranoid grasp on straws made up of proprietary systems, what is left for us to hold? Would we float free for a moment, suddenly disoriented, then newly stable as

process

Tend to the Garden

There's really only one thing that will doom the codebase, and that is neglect. As you know, there is an abundance of tools and libraries out there, especially in the JavaScript community. Sometimes you're locked into using older versions for any number of reasons, some internal.

process

Refactoring the Process

The best managers I have had do two things well: they remove impediments to a trusted developer's understanding of the larger business purpose behind that developer's task, and they, as proficient developers in their own right, approach solving problems in what seems to me to almost

javascript

Echos of EmpireJS

Overall, my initial impressions were mixed. I was very interested in parsing a new language with PegJS, mildly interested in code analysis tools, and lost interest when it came to fabricating a crude drum pad instrument. But whatever your pleasure or poison, hopefully the earnest appeal for community and improving

process

In Deference to the Human Interest

I don't think it's a stretch to acknowledge that there are plenty of problems that humankind faces that just will not be solved by the Internet. Which then begs the question: what problems, if any, are worth solving? The Internet is a network. And not simply

process

Belling the Cat

Are we on track for a future where the skills of a developer will become all but ubiquitous? Will there still be a place for product managers and UX designers unless they are not merely conversant in the tools of a developer, but proficient? Will fluency with code be a

process

User Experience is Nothing New...

(...though it can lead to extraordinary results.) The fact that you can get a group of professionals, like engineers, who stereotypically can have the tendency to be singularly, rationally focused, to start thinking in terms of personal experience, emotion, and storytelling as being of primary importance in creating human-centered products

process

Your Moment of DevZen

Some code you live with for the long haul, some is more ephemeral. The thing is, it may not be immediately apparent which is which! Make it maintainable and give it structure, but don't get too precious or build brittle systems that are hard to back out of.

process

Checklist for Code Design

When cooking up a new batch of code, it helps to ask these questions... Does the code make a product useful? Does the code help make a product understandable? Is the code itself understandable? Does the code have the potential to be long-lasting? Is the code thorough? Does it cover

html

HTML5 Please Shows the Way

A well designed site by the folks who brought us HTML5 Boilerplate, Modernizr and CSS3, HTML5 Please shows how to implement specific HTML5 features: with confidence, with a fallback or with polyfills. The site also breaks it all down with a searchable interface and the ability to filter by html,

databases

A Well Balanced Comparison of Mongo and Couch

A surprisingly balanced comparison between Mongo and Couch is posted on the Mongo docs website. While the focus of technical talking points drifts towards Mongo, this is inevitable, as the doc is written from the perspective of Mongo experts. However, the writing is not pre-disposed to favor Mongo as a