Articles by Erin Swenson-Healey
Applying Functional Programming Principles To Your Rails Codebase
All the programmers around me seem to have very strong opinions about functional programming. The Internet certainly loves to talk about it. Some of the concepts are interesting – but many of them (at first) don’t seem to apply for those of us writing database-fronting web applications. What can we apply from a world in …
Hanging up on Callbacks: Generators in ECMAScript 6
I hear people whine about asynchronous callbacks in JavaScript constantly. I admit that wrapping your head around control flow in the World of JavaScript (also known as “Callback Hell” or the “The Pyramid of Doom” by aforementioned whiners) can be a bit of a mind-explosion if you’re used to a top-down, synchronous programming style. “Just …
The JavaScript Event Loop: Explained
What’s this post about? With JavaScript approaching near-ubiquity as the scripting language of the web browser, it benefits you to have a basic understanding of its event-driven interaction model and how it differs from the request-response model typically found in languages like Ruby, Python, and Java. In this post, I’ll explain some core concepts of …
Sinatra Best Practices: Part One
While Sinatra’s one-file approach may work well for your one-off, smaller application – it can quickly become a mess as you add on multiple routes, route-handlers, helpers, and configuration. So what’s a programmer to do? In reading Sinatra’s documentation I’ve found a few morsels that have enabled us to split our otherwise-monolithic (I realize this …