It’s the little things that matter the most sometimes.

Without Chewbacca’s help, we never would have won the war.

I first caught wind of Google’s JSConf.eu scholarships-for-females program in a roundabout way. I had just started following Rebecca Murphey’s posts when I saw this tweet.

At first I thought very little of it but after seeing Nicole Sullivan’s and then Murphey’s more in-depth posts, I followed through to the rest of the thread.

1. Personally, I’m strongly in the camp the Google is doing the right thing with these scholarships. These sorts of scholarships exist all over the place, targeting all kinds of specific groups. If we are going to grow as a community, we need a broad range of voices. Sometimes the best way to get those voices is to give them a boost on the way up.
2. I feel like this thread of discourse comes up at least once a year. Every time that it comes up and someone cites that we are far from a 50/50-male/female mix in our professional community, I think “there must be some perfectly logical explanation for this” and almost always, when you look at it logically, the sad truth is that sexist pressures drive women out. I don’t know what is going to change this, but it needs to change.
3. To the women that have spoken up about this; to the men that have come to their support; to Google for inadvertently starting this year’s furor: thank you.

The politics of this subject are complicated and subtle; that doesn’t help. But we can help ourselves to make this a vibrant and productive community by speaking out and speaking up—even if it’s just in some small way.

Beach House, “Walk in the Park”

Let’s just get this one out of the way. That blog (my real blog?) is where I do most of my other blogging—and have since roughly 2003. There’s a rich history there.

The short version: I wanted to like it…

First, what I did like:

• It seemed fairly forgiving — which is to say that it did not try to coerce me into creating projects just so I could open up a few directories and files. I could just randomly open directories as if they were projects etc. and I did not need to fuss around with VCS integration etc. This is not to suggest that any of the other editors and IDEs require this but at least here was easy and (more so) immediately obvious how to do this.
• Code-folding seemed well implemented. It had a good sense of scope and would let me fold down just portions of a method, or just one branch of an if statement, etc.
• The code-sense/auto-complete features are great. When they work, and disappointing when they don’t (see below).

What I was iffy on:

• The code-sense. Sometimes it seemed to have suggestions… sometimes it has no idea what I was typing. Sometimes it would have indexed my project files and made suggestions based on them. Rhen the next time it had amnesia. And so it goes.

And finally, what I did not like.

• Come on guys. That icon is lame. I could get over that but…
• It often forgot the files related to a given project. When I did set up a couple of repos as projects, WebStorm seemed to “forget” what was in it about half the time. References to related files would be missing — e.g., it would open the previously open files as tabs but the snapshot of the filesystem would be missing from the Project inspector.
• It seemed slow and sluggish. It was not exactly crashy, but on more than a few instance, it would completely lock up my machine for several minutes. Perhaps it was a thread hog? On at least one instance, I noticed in the OS X Activity Monitor that it was using more threads than any other process except the kernel (also: it was using a ton of memory). The cause? Maybe, maybe not. But it was an awful coincidence that its resource consumption would be so high right around the same time that the rest of the system was pegged.
• And while we’re at it: I gave up trying to get the colors/syntax highlighting “just right”. (I like a dark blue background with light text; thanks for only bundling black-and-blue-on-white.)

I wish the JetBrains guys good luck with WebStorm. I know tons of happy IDEA users and I gave WebStorm a try following their recommendations. But this one did not work out for me.

var n = new Number(1);
alert(n);				// 1
typeof n;				// object
n instanceof Number;	// true

var nn = 1;
alert(nn);				// 1
typeof nn;				// number
n instanceof Number;	// false

n == nn;				// true

typeof n == typeof nn;	// false

n++;
nn++;
alert(n);				// 2
alert(nn);				// 2

n == nn;				// true

typeof n;				// number
typeof nn;				// number
typeof n == typeof nn;	// true

The type coercion will ultimately work in your favor but the main point is that the type coercion has to take place in the first place. Granted, it is probably an edge case to do something like:

var n = new Number(x); // where x is a global storing an incrementer

function doMath(a){
	if (typeof a == "number") {
		return a + x;
	}
}

…but you never know. There’s some strange code out there.

There is still a chance to stop him, to terminate him. And as he has not checked in these changes, he will lose them forever.

If I can only make it to the terminal in time and overwrite those changes in the clone’s version control apparatus.

And indeed, I make it in time. There is both rage and lament in that bellowed yelp of his. He knows it is too late. But he comes after me anyway. If only to make me suffer alongside.

They fire fighters have all come out to fight the fire. Ladders. They are stacking ladders up the side of the building, consecutively up the same way that the ladders go down into a granite quarry. One ladder after another at a steep incline. It sways and wobbles. Every once in a while the chief decides that one of the men must be sacrificed. A lieutenant somewhere on the ladder will turn and sing a plaintive song to one of the other men until he become hypnotized and willingly leaps from the ladder.

Onward they push. Onward they stack the ladders until they reach the roof and the men start to spill over, rushing downward as if to smother the flames.

Somewhere in Central Park, a police officer shoots a pimp, and sets free two reluctant hookers.