Welp, it’s been over 8 years since I lasted posted here. Time for an update! New Site The old skilldrick.co.uk My old site was a self-hosted wordpress.org blog on a webhosting reseller account I used to have for making websites for friends and family. This year the hosting company cancelled the tier I was on. I’d been meaning to move off it for a while so it was a good nudge.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog. Most of my creative output has been focused elsewhere, on non-blogging activities. I figured it was time to add some kind of content to my blog. So here’s what I’ve been working on recently (where recently means “since I last published here”). Audio programming Once upon a time I was going to be a recording engineer, and I spent four years learning all about audio and recording and music.

It’s time for another one of those self-indulgent “what am I going to do with the next year?” posts. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since the last one. First off, I’m going to look at the past year. Finish SICP I definitely progressed with it, but not finished yet. Get a decent online portfolio As a matter of course I put all my toy projects into my Github account, but there’s nothing particularly exciting there.

On 23 October 2008, on holiday in Devon with my girlfriend, I read an article in the Guardian’s Technology section about the UK games industry. From that point on I was certain that I wanted to become a developer of some kind. I wrote more about this in Finding your passion. It’s now three years and a day since then, and I’m winding down at my current job in preparation for a move to San Francisco, as I somehow managed to land myself a job at Twitter as a junior front-end engineer.

In JavaScript, there are two main patterns for creating objects with state - plain JavaScript objects and closures. In this post I’m going to highlight the similarites and consider the pros and cons of the two approaches. An object is an entity with state and methods to access/modify that state. There are two main approaches to this, which I’ll be calling “objects” and “closures”. For the rest of this post I’ll only use the word object to refer to plain JavaScript objects, in an attempt to avoid confusion.

They say in JavaScript “everything is an object”. They’re wrong. Some types in JavaScript are so-called “primitive types”, and they don’t act like objects. These types are: Undefined Null Boolean Number String The confusion comes from the fact that the boolean, number and string types can be treated like objects in a limited way. For example, the expression "I'm no object".length returns the value 13. This happens because when you attempt to access properties or methods on a primitive value, JavaScript instantiates a wrapper object temporarily, just so you can access its methods.

<rant> There’s a common phrase used within software development: If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail It exists in various forms, but the original source is the Law of the instrument, or Maslow’s Hammer. I started thinking about this while reading through Head First Design Patterns today (a bizarre book, not quite sure yet whether I can recommend it). As part of my self-education into the Gang of Four Design Patterns, I thought I’d start with this, as I’d read recommendations to read this before the GoF book.

For a long time I’ve found the subject of the equivalence of closures and objects fascinating. The problem with creating objects using closures is that there isn’t a way to do inheritance (although you should always favour composition over inheritance anyway!). I thought it would be fun to see if it was possible to implement an object system in JavaScript with inheritance, without using any plain JavaScript objects. To do this, I set myself two rules:

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Any time I can find to listen to them I do - when I’m cooking, eating, washing up, walking to work, brushing my teeth, going shopping, running … It’s not always easy to find the best podcasts, so I thought it would be helpful to list them here, along with a quick description, and some selected episodes where appropriate. This list is in rough order of preference.