Archive for the ‘thanks’ Category

I stumbled upon jQuery when it was still in its early stages when all it did was offer powerful CSS and regexp style selectors. It immediately made DOM manipulation from within JavaScript easy, simple and reliable.

Within a few months of my discovery, jQuery had fixed cross-browser issues, and actually made it the choice for ensuring cross-browser support.

Here are some of the things that led me to consistently choose jQuery over Prototype, even if it meant eschewing the Rails/Prototype coupling and doing things the hard way.

• CSS-style and RegExp selectors.
• Light-weight – smaller file size, faster download, quicker load.
• Plays nice with others - jQuery.noConflict();
• Many powerful mechanisms for traversing and manipulating the DOM.
• Queue up onload logic from multiple places with jQuery(document).ready()
• Convenient call chaining  - jQuery(‘#thing’).doThis().that().more();
• Extensibility and lots of plugins.
• Excellent, fine-grained AJAX support.

With such features, it is no surprise that the jQuery has evolved into a thriving, distributed ecosystem providing innumerable plugins and UI and effects frameworks on top such as jqueryUI.

Thanks to all the contributors who make it happen.

jQuery("#resig,plugin.writers,.contributors").thanks();

Late in February, at the Recent Changes Camp, I noticed some familiar faces and so walked into the Calagator Hacking session, hoping to spend a few hours learning and contributing to the code.

Alas, I was ill-equipped, lacking git. I had heard several people evangelize git, hold training sessions and in general rhapsodize about it. All the cool kids were using it. For several time and efficiency reasons, I had put off switching to git. Meanwhile, I was dealing with the practical annoyances, since many of my svn:externals were deserting to git repositories, forcing me to download tarballs.

So that day, with some help from some of the friendly Calagator folks, I got myself git. From there it was a short step to using github, and short time before I switched multiple client and project repositories to git.

As a result, my coding workflow has improved tremendously.

Sometimes, we need a nudge to stop putting things off and start doing something that improves our lives. And community meet-ups such as RCC, BarCamp, and OSBridge, are great at connecting and catalyzing people to do just that.

Thanks to all the great folks who infuse Portland with this community spirit.

AirDB solved a pressing need in abstracting SQLite operations and thinking in terms of object behavior. I was able to design and build it quickly thanks to ideas and various bits, pieces and whole chunks of work that has been done by various people. 

Thanks to Jacob Wright for AIR ActiveRecord. His ideas and code on Inflection and Reflection have been useful and incorporated with due credit into AirDB.

Thanks to Christophe Coenrats for demonstrating how to use annotations and meta-data. 

AirDB of course is adapted to solve particular problems of interest, including support for explicit, incremental migrations (useful for AIR apps that update themselves) and chainable associations, and is available for others to build upon or use.

TextMate has increased my programming happiness. 

A well-crafted, elegant and intelligent text editor, TextMate is a rare combination of graphical power, customizable keyboard shortcuts, sensible project management and extensible smarts. 

Most importantly, it does all this with a speed and responsiveness that keeps you in the code flow. 

Nothing is skimped, nothing is extraneous, nothing forced. You are free to develop your personal interaction style that works best for you. Here are the things that I appreciate the most:

1. Syntax highlighting and automatic indenting for a range of languages, including multiple scopes such as when HTML combines Javascript and Ruby.
2. Quickly go to a file by typing just a few characters. The pattern matching for the dynamic file selector is powerful and intuitive. 
3. Ultra-quick Find/Replace at multiple levels. The Project level find is collapsible at the file level. 
4. Multiple file tabs that are easy to switch and move around. 
5. Code navigation, bookmarking and text folding.
6. Rich set of language and task bundles with code generation snippets, macros for common cases and more.  

Thanks to Allan Odgaard. 

Also, thanks to all those who contributed snippets and bundles to TextMate.