The Right Tool, The Right Idiom

As more and more traditionally-trained developers have migrated into the Javascript space, I've seen quite a few attempts to bring across idioms, patterns, and even and tools commonly found in large OO code bases. Some of those things have made their way into the core language itself and some have caused the creation of new languages. Nearly all of these examples illustrate the application one tool chain's idioms onto another - and in many of the above examples, the result is unintentional and unnecessary complexity.

Posted by Howard Monday, June 13, 2022

RDF Inferencing In Action

If you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you've probably heard me go on about linked data is magically awesome. In this post, I'll show you an example.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Functional Javascript Playground

I'm a big believer that the functional programming approach may be the only way to write Javascript code and stay sane. To continue building up my own skill as well as share some of those opportunities with you, I've created a repository to show and get feedback on examples.

Posted by Howard Monday, August 20, 2018

Some Functional Javascript Goodness

The best code is the code that you don't have to write. Functional techniques can help write less - and therefore more reliable - code. Even in Javascript.

Posted by Howard Thursday, November 17, 2016

Managing a Database Connection in an ExpressJS Application

A Web API or Web application backed by a database of some sort is a pretty typical application architecture regardless of what language or platform we might be looking at. So you can imagine my surprise that I haven’t really ever been able to find a satisfactory answer for how to best accomplish this kind of thing for an Express application that uses MongoDB. Maybe I either don’t know how to search very well, or maybe I just don’t really understand the answers that I’m finding, but the typical kind of answer that I’ve come across in the past reads something like this:

Posted by Howard Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Surprise! JavaScript Guard Clauses

I spent more time then I had planned this weekend debugging an issue in some code I wrote, and at the end of it all, discovered a JavaScript language feature that I had read about a while ago but never used (intentionally, that is). To explain, consider the following predicate function definition (and yes, I know that Underscore has this function - my specific case would have brought in some additional concepts, so I’m simplfying here).

Posted by Howard Monday, March 24, 2014

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I’m into a bit of everything. Some might say that makes me attention-deficit - I like to think it gives me the ability to see things from more angles. I’m a huge technology enthusiast, and while I've worked for some pretty large tech companies, my interests are pretty broad. The opinions here are mine alone.