A “Reactive” 3D Game Engine in Excel?
A great article over at Gamasutra outlines a toy 3D engine that uses a spreadsheet to do the calculations. Instead of the imperative approach, this “engine” is more functional-reactive. As mentioned in our post on Reactive.js the other day, Excel serves as a good metaphor when starting to grok functional reactive programming.
Reactive.js: Functional Reactive Programming in Javascript
Reactive.js is a pure Javascript library inspired by Functional Reactive Programming. If you’ve ever used Excel or another spreadsheet program, you’ve already done something like FRP. Reactive.js aims to bring FRP to Javascript by augmenting Javascript functions, allowing you to declare data flows in your code by representing your values as reactive functions that depend on… Read more
Not too late to sign up for Odersky’s Scala Coursera class
Just a quick note if you haven’t seen it. Martin Odersky is teaching a Coursera class Functional Programming Principles in Scala. On the backend we’ve been experimenting with how we can use Scala more easily in our 99% Java project, and apparently we’ve been talking about it enough that Matt Baker decided this was a… Read more
Continuous Deployment: API Compatibility Verification
We haven’t said much about our continuous deployment system recently. Mostly that’s because there hasn’t been much to say. We invest in systems and infrastructure through a process called proportional investment: we spend time on areas that cause us problems and our deployment infrastructure has performed well, requiring little incremental investment. However, recently we made… Read more
Tame long tab titles with dynamically CSS-only scrolling
The problem: you have a long title for a tab (or some other small UI element) and it is important for the client to see all of the content, but you lack the space to show it. What do you do? Tooltip? Hide the overflow? Truncate with ellipsis? Here’s a suggestion: “active ellipsis”! Using a… Read more
Webkit’s -webkit-font-smoothing can make you fat
In a recent set of changes to our user interface, we came across rendering issues that were driving us bonkers: how could two pieces of text with the same color value appear to have different weight? It turned out the culprit was font smoothing. The font-smoothing CSS property is nothing really new at this point… Read more