Greatest Hits (Vol. 1)

I’m just realizing that this here blog just celebrated its first birthday — my first ‘hello world‘ post here was May 1, 2012. This seems like a good opportunity to go looking through the archives and point to some older posts that newer visitors/subscribers may not have read.
Ryan Brubaker did a great three part series on using CoffeeScript and Backbone.js:

CoffeeScript has been all the rage lately and I’ve been wanting to hop on board the bandwagon. I’ve also seen Backbone.js mentioned quite a bit and was even more intrigued after listening to this .NET Rocks podcast. I decided to convert some plain JavaScript code I had in a side project to use both CoffeeScript and Backbone.js and see how things went.
The project is a simplified morse code simulator that animates morse code being sent over a telegraph line. The complete source is available here and the running code can be seen here.

I was interested to learn this week that the folks at github recently updated their JavaScript style guide to require that all new JavaScript code be written using CoffeeScript. That’s a pretty significant vote of confidence in my eyes — if you’ve been assuming that CoffeeScript is just a fad, maybe this will prompt you to re-evaluate that stance.
Steve Huey dropped a whole bunch of useful iOS/OS X-related posts:

• RubyMotion Brings Ruby to iOS
• A few thoughts on iOS 6
• CocoaPods – Library Management for Objective-C Projects
• Another Look at RubyMotion
• Audiobus – Live app-to-app audio streaming for iOS

Along the way, I contributed a few pieces talking about the idea of programming as a liberal art, and as something that most people should learn how to do at some level:

I believe that everyone should learn to write a little code, and play an instrument, and make things out of wood, and tend a garden, and cook, and, yes, do a little plumbing, too. They shouldn’t learn these things because they’ll use them every day to earn a paycheck, they should learn them because it makes them better thinkers, and better able to take care of themselves. On top of that — if vast empires were being built on top of plumbing the way that they’re being built on software, I’d say that anyone who was happy to ignore it as a black art practiced by wizards was making a big mistake. The value of acquiring a new mode of thinking isn’t affected by the fact that most people won’t need to use pointers or recursion on a daily basis.

• Yes, Do Learn To Code!
• Khan Academy Tackles CS Education
• Learnable Programming
• Start Them Young — All Of Them

If you missed these the first time around — check them out.