Most people suck at communicating—and I’m one of them. I get passionate about this issue because, really, it’s such an simple thing to change. Reordering a few words, pulling a few out, and generally saying less can have a profound impact—but then, why is it so hard? Because it’s hard to be honest, and it’s hard to hear honesty. I’m a perfect example of this. I make elaborate fabrications to sound well-informed when, really, I don’t have a clue what’s going on. It would be better to admit I’m clueless and move on. But, I could lose my contract, or [...]

I’ve been thinking about practice lately—and about growth. Here are some thoughts: Programming is a complicated job. Many people see it as a craft, and as craftsmen, programmers must spend countless hours honing their skills and improving their expertise to reach a level to compete at the level they desire to be at. For example: If I want to build web pages at an amateur level, I simply need to know HTML, some CSS, and maybe some jQuery. For every question that might come up, there is usually a hundred answers on Google. If I want to do the same thing [...]

It’s been some time since we’ve seen any new javascript minifiers out there. Google Closure was probably the most recent but many argue that was basically a re-hash of Yahoo’s YUI Compressor. This is something different. As web applications get better, there is more Javascript. Caching has been a big help to this—even though only effective for about 40-60% of your audience. The problem with caching however, is that when a new version of the code is released the user must download all of it again. Diffable JS makes this less of an issue becuase the user might only need [...]