Tag: Geek

How to be good in web-mastering?

If you are a website developer you are familiar with ready-to-use web templates, programming frameworks, and content management systems (CMS). Such solutions “out of the box” make the web-mastering a convenient and simple process.

But very often there is a task to add custom scripts to a web-site bypassing CMS or other non-standard way. Especially if you do not have full access to the source code of the system. The task becomes very difficult if the website is built using an outdated code or an abandoned framework.

The best principle in software development is the same as for medicine:

Primum non nocere (Do not harm)

Therefore, the best way is to make your own code independent of the environment. Then add small and simple (in one line) injections to the working code base. In the embedded code, check the existence of your own variables, try to call only the standard language functions.

Choose the proper method to change the website context. You should select from simple to complex:

  • printing new html blocks as a text
  • call custom function that generates new content
  • include the script files directly
  • add own framework scripts into every old files

And never do the following:

  • edit old/cms code directly
  • rewrite all code using other programming language
  • re-create website using some modern CMS

Happy webmastering 🙂

Power of Backward Loops

Loops aka cycles (while, for, do until, etc) are common in programming. Actually they are a language level implementation of the iterator pattern.

Those who learned programming in the college/university, remember lots of tasks for sorting an array or traverse a double-linked list in both directions. But in practice, very few people apply the backward loops.

There are a number of tasks where the reverse iteration automatically solves a bunch of problems, for example:

If you need to release all elements of array/collection/list, it is much easier to start from the end and delete the last element each time, rather then go from the beginning, save the length of the container, make the reference for every deleting object, and so on.

Compare this: 

var len = someCollection.length();
for (i = 0, i < len, i++) {
    var element = someCollection[i];
    someCollection.delete(i);
    delete element;
}

with that: 

var i = someCollection.length();
while (i--) {
    delete someCollection[i];
}

So the backward loop is not only for students, the backward traverse rules in many cases 🙂

Research and Destroy!

"Research and Destroy" is a computer geek joke. It is a misrepresentation of Research and Development (aka R&D) term into something scary and funny.

There is a grain of truth in every joke! A small mistake in software development process, especially for public products, could destroys lots of things at once!

BTW, BgRnD abbreviation contains the similar meaning 🙂