In two previous posts about writing better bug reports, I've detailed the information developers need to be able to reproduce — and hence diagnose and fix — bugs. Since then, an unstated assumption in both posts has been nagging at me: that developers must be able to reproduce a bug in order to diagnose and fix it.

To a developer, this is not an assumption — it's truth, and obvious. But to non-developers, the necessity of reproducibility is not obvious. If it were, devs wouldn't see so many bug reports that say little more than "A vague thing vaguely happened — fix it!!!"

I think this disconnect is the primary cause of frustrating-to-devs bug reports. If we can better understand the reason for the disconnect, maybe it'll be easier to convince non-devs of the necessity of reproducibility. 

I recently found myself building out a comp which seemed to have only enough code repetition to include a header and footer. However, the further I got into build-out the more code repetition emerged. I saw an opportunity for a MVC-like views system to help, so I set out to build one to make my build-out process easier.

A big challege with sites utilizing JavaScript is determining which JS should be executed on each page. Here are some approaches to doing this, along with my preferred method. While libraries like Backbone and Ember have ways of executing JavaScript, this article will mainly focus on executing JavaScript for web sites, not web apps. So I'm talking about more marketing style sites instead of applications. An example would be this very site versus something like Gmail.

This past fall, a group of us set out to (re-)learn the C programming language using Zed's Learn C the Hard Way as our primary resource. In the age of high-level languages like Ruby and JavaScript, it may seem a bit strange to take such a "step back" when it's been 10+ years since I have had any significant experience using the language. So why do it?

I wanted a new challenge.

Draggable controls raise an interesting challenge when  Backbone.Views share a common model.