Posts by Chris
Never pile stuff on top of a container
The moment you put something on a box with a lid, you’re going to have to shuffle things around every time you want anything inside the box. And most likely, the stuff inside the box is important, but not important enough that you’ll bother going inside the box if you have to work at it. [...]
Working with Terrible Code, Part One: CKEditor is not to be trusted (writing a CKEditor plugin)
Understanding Terrible Code, Part One: Writing a CKEditor Plugin Exposition: Why should you care about a random text editor? Modding CKEditor is a well-designed exercise in self-flagellation. CKEditor is a text editor plugin that works with rich text (bold, italics, tables, links, etc.). If you’ve ever used Gmail or Hotmail, you’ve used something similar. CKEditor [...]
“When you have enough data, sometimes, you don’t have to be too clever”
Peter Norvig, famed AI researcher and one of the creators of the Stanford AI online class: Past, Present, Future Vision of AI – Google and AAAI 2011 “And it was fun looking at the comments, because you’d see things like ‘well, I’m throwing in this naive Bayes now, but I’m gonna come back and fix [...]
Using code coverage to decide what to deprecate
A recent post on building a slimmer jQuery got me thinking about the process of deciding what to cut. From a code perspective, it’s easier to add new features than remove old ones. From a user perspective, it’s much, much easier to add new features than remove old ones. Nobody knows about your new feature, [...]