You might have seen your colleagues dropping in ‘use strict’ into their JavaScript code and wondered: WTF does that do? Another place you’ll often see use strict in place is within libraries and shared code on somewhere like GitHub. Strict mode is an opt-in way for developers to follow a restricted set of JavaScript. One reason developers might use strict mode is because it allows for greater optimisation by the browser. Using strict mode means that the browser has to make less judgement calls about what is and is not possible this means that the browser can take short cuts when it comes to interpreting your code because it knows you’ve followed a stricter standard. ...

Often in JavaScript you’ll see a developer use === in their conditionals instead of ==. Most languages will use single equals for assignment and double equals for comparison, JavaScript is no exception here. This third variation of triple equals is included in JavaScript and sees to cause the most confusion for developers and it turns for a very good reason. Triple equals is most often included in loosely typed languages such as JavaScript and PHP. A language like Ruby also has triple equals but it is used in a different way. ...

Lately I’ve been working on a website that integrates Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE). I haven’t worked with GCSE before and found it somewhat difficult to work with. The API and creating the search is a really easy process and the Google team did a great job with sensible defaults. The main problem for our team was that we had already built a search component in our front-end build that looked like this: ...

At the end of last year I was asked to speak at the ASMS’ Presentation Night. I was speaking to high school students in years 10-12. Here is the transcript! Who here believes the world will get better over the next 20 years? Okay, good. You guys are my people. Everyone else, you might be wrong. ...

A couple of weeks ago Sami and I went to a competition called Unleashed. Unleashed is an open data competition where the Chief Information Officer gets a bunch of data sets from different government departments such as Health, Transport & Infrastructure, Commercialisation and so many others. They release this in a lot of different formats some are more useable than others and come in better formats while some are in unknown or obscure formats. ...

What is Startup Weekend? Startup Weekend is an event hosted all over the world. The basic premise of the weekend is to take your business from concept to creation in 54 hours. It might sound a little bit crazy but it’s absolutely possible to do and some teams even turn a profit in that time. The focus is on the Lean Startup Methodology by Eric Ries, where people are encouraged to remove traditional boundaries and monetary restraints and focus on getting stuff done. ...

Earlier this year I got an email from Jo Earp from Oz Teacher Magazine, she was browsing around on some public school websites and found ours, let’s be honest the ASMS website pretty amazing. Jo thought it was as amazing as we did and she wanted to do an interview with the people responsible. Myself and some of my co-workers were chosen as we were most relevant to the creation of the website and the advertising materials for the school in general. ...