It’s been ten years since jQuery started rocking the web and it has stuck around for very good reasons. jQuery offers its users an easy-to-use interface to interact with the DOM, perform Ajax requests, create animations, and much more. In addition, unlike the DOM API, jQuery implements the composite pattern. Because of that, you can call jQuery methods on a jQuery collection regardless of the amount of elements included in it (zero, one, or many).

Java 9 is coming! And it is more than just Project Jigsaw. (I was surprised, too.) It is bringing a lot of small and not-so-small changes to the platform and I’d like to look at them one by one. I’ll tag all these posts and you can find them here.

The SOLID principles are often presented as being core to good code design practice. Each of S, O, L, I and D do not, however, necessarily mean what programmers expect they mean or are taught. By understanding this range of beliefs we can learn more about practices for objects, components and interfaces than just S, O, L, I and D.

This talk reviews the SOLID principles and reveals contradictions and different interpretations. It is through paradoxes and surprises we often gain insights. We will leave SOLID somewhat more fluid, but having learnt from them more than expected.

From years of watching master programmers, I have observed certain common patterns in their workflows. From years of coaching skilled journeyman programmers, I have observed the absence of those patterns. I have seen what a difference introducing the patterns can make. Here are ways effective programmers get the most out of their precious 3e9 seconds on the planet.

The theme here is scaling your brain. The journeyman learns to solve bigger problems by solving more problems at once. The master learns to solve even bigger problems than that by solving fewer problems at once. Part of the wisdom is subdividing so that integrating the separate solutions will be a smaller problem than just solving them together.