Machineloop...

Famo.us is all Javascript, and it uniquely places all DOM elements in a flat structure using absolute positioning to manage where the elements should show on the page. For every html element you need to display, you need a surface to render it. Now you can add as many elements to the content portion of a surface, but if you want it to independently interact with other surfaces using custom methods, you may need to write your own surface.

I’ve been playing with Famous, the new open source javascript framework which is extremely performant and all written in JavaScript. In my novice opinion, Famous is a dream come true for JS developers. Famous takes JS calls and turns them into DOM elements and manages them all for you. No more making calls to DOM elements which must already exist on the page: Famous will do it for you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought it was cumbersome to teach my students to inject HTML into a page using string concatenation or some other clumsy method. They...…

I got into Famo.us! I’ve been playing with it on and off today, and let me say that I really do think it’s a game changer. It makes playing with physics in JS fun, and not that difficult to grasp. It definately takes the DOM and turns it on its head, which may be long overdue. Famo.us is the kind of company where I would love to work.

Open Source .NET Microsoft is finally open sourcing .NET. At last, Microsoft is coming around. Open Source produces better code and makes it easier for developers to share their code instead of obsessing over proprietary code bases. Of course there will always be a need for proprietary code, but keep it minimal, and certainly don’t hold on to it for years if you build products that millions of people need to used on a daily basis. There’s no way you can hire a development team larger than your userbase: plain and simple. Finally, Microsoft is turning the corner, but what...…

Technical interviews don’t come natural to anyone, but I especially freeze when I just can’t manage to figure out the problem I’m asked to solve. I try my best to talk my way through it, but I’m sure that if the interviewer didn’t have any patience they’d be ready ready to toss me out the door as soon as I got started.

Jekyll is a Ruby static site generator which creates minimalist, beautiful, and responsive blogs. It’s designed to be used by programmers and anyone who wants to focus on writing great content in Markdown instead of spending all day playing with backend features, though it has plenty of features to be sure.