Mr. Joel E. Kemp

What is Idiomatic Programming?

Joel Kemp — Sat, 04 May 2013 12:38:55 +0000

I had no idea what the phrase “idiomatic programming” meant and it wasn’t an easy find on the web. I thought I’d define idiomatic programming for any beginners out there. Idiomatic programming means that your program contains statements that are unique to the language; i.e., you actually use the expressive power (or lack thereof – [...]

Javascript: Codekit Merge and Minification build system

Joel Kemp — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:54:56 +0000

I’ve been using Codekit since it was in pre-release beta and haven’t looked back. Recently, I was building out a single-page app for YouNow and needed a build system to merge and minify my JS files. I was on the hunt for several setups and here’s what I settled on. There are many tools available [...]

My dev setup at YouNow: SFTP and a Remote Environment

Joel Kemp — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:06:20 +0000

When you don’t have a local development environment, development processes take a big hit in efficiency. Our stack at YouNow is dated and non-developer friendly, so I’ve had to work around some of the obstacles. This writeup will serve as an insight into my day to day workflow, in addition to serving as some documentation [...]

Javascript: Computing changed fields in forms

Joel Kemp — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:25:53 +0000

I’m building a new settings app for YouNow. In the app, users can modify their existing biographical information. This results in the need to identify which fields have been edited. There are a few ways to solve this. Per-field events One solution is to bind to a change event for each form element. For each [...]

Building the YouNow Profile App: Initial Prototype

Joel Kemp — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:29:42 +0000

The initial prototype implementation for the YouNow profile app was a pure jQuery, single file script. In this post, I\’ll talk about the point at which the code became unbearable and how that led to the appreciation of Backbone.js. This post is part 2 in a series of posts about building the profile app. See [...]

Building the YouNow Profile app: Intro

Joel Kemp — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:44:12 +0000

I architected and built the entire front-end for the new profile app at YouNow. The project served as my first Backbone.js application. I had tried learning the library a handful of times before, to no avail. I kept wondering \”why is Backbone even necessary?\” Through a series of posts, I\’d like to shed some light [...]

Detecting URLs within a string PHP and Javascript

Joel Kemp — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:03:13 +0000

I had to roll my own regex solution for translating embedded links within text to clickable html links. Stuff on the web had too many false positives. Hope it helps! Javascript: /(((http(s?)(:\/\/))?([w]{3}\.)?)([a-z|0-9])+\.(com(\.au)?|org|me|net|ly|be|gl|info|(co(\.))?uk|ca|nz|tv)(\/[^\s]+)*)+/g PHP: "/(((http(s?)(:\/\/))?([w]{3}\.)?)([a-z|0-9])+\.(com(\.au)?|org|me|net|ly|be|gl|info|(co(\.))?uk|ca|nz|tv)((\/[^\s]+)*)+)/" Properly detects the urls in the following formats: Including subpaths:

Javascript: The Leading Semicolon

Joel Kemp — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 01:18:58 +0000

If you get a chance to look at some un-minified javascript code on Github or other, you might see a leading semicolon before the opening IIFE closure or a library or script: ;(function () { })(); Notice the first character, the semicolon? This looks pretty bizarre, but it’s used to prevent other poorly formed scripts [...]

Javascript: The window object and IIFE

Joel Kemp — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:57:54 +0000

Browsers come with two very useful objects: document and window. The document object is necessary for interacting with the rendered HTML (called the Document Object Model or DOM). However, the window object is equally important. I see many up and coming Javascript programmers abuse the window object unknowingly. I\’d like to shed some light on [...]

Javascript Pass By Reference Arguments

Joel Kemp — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 21:51:12 +0000

When learning a new programming language, one important question is always “does language X pass arguments by value or by reference?” Javascript behaves closely to Java in its treatment of arguments – in that all types are passed by value. However for certain types (like object types), a pointer is passed in by value – [...]