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Thoughts on technologies, code, and how to improve

Understanding Regular Expressions 3: Zero Width Selectors

Understanding Regular Expressions 3: Zero Width Selectors

Readers of the previous post in this series will remember a Pig Latin translator we created using groups and captures. That translator included a selector, \b, we had not yet explored. It was described as a "zero-width" selector. The concept can be a bit foreign. Up to this

Understanding Regular Expressions 2: Groups and Captures

Understanding Regular Expressions 2: Groups and Captures

In the first post of this series, we looked at the basic building blocks of regular expressions: the characters and quantities. The next major building blocks are groupings and captures. Both features are based off the parenthesis, and can be used to great effect. Groupings Groups allow a regular expression

Understanding Regular Expressions 1: Characters and Quantities

Understanding Regular Expressions 1: Characters and Quantities

Regular expressions, like CSS or the workings of Agile process, are some of the least understood coding aspects among young programmers, and for good reason. Regex use a syntax entirely of their own, they are rarely a necessity when building a solution, and they are infamous for their inability to

Editor as Artbush

Editor as Artbush

Editors are tools. Rarely, however, do we consider our abilities with an editor as part of coding mastery. In traditional canvas art, we can see the painter's mastery of their tools in their works. Often times, how artists use their brushes and knives become a defining feature of

What CSS Needs: Better Background Positioning

Background-Position-X, Background-Position-Y Background positioning is a strong case for seperating a grouped rule into individual parts. Why include x, y positioning exclusively as a rolled-up modifier? What is the danger in breaking out the properties as is done with margin or padding? Even more confusing, is this has been supported

What CSS Needs: Better Positioning

There are a series of changes CSS could really benefit from that are largely ignored in CSS3. Generally, CSS3 improvements focus on the more complex design and updated methods: box shadows, rounded corners, etc. Personally, i'd like to see a "back-to-the-basics" approach that would fix some

Save-Once Backbone and Collection.saveAll()

Backbone.js does a lot of things right when it comes to client-heavy interfaces. Client-side M.V.Collection, RESTful by design and structured code locations are just some of the benefits i point to as reasons for its use. But, just as the version number (0.9.2 as of