Matthias Mullie
When asked for estimates, you usually don’t have much more than your gut feeling to go on. You just know that this one thing is going to take longer because it’s more fragile than that other thing. But why is that?
People much smarter than me have researched this subject and there are good ways of measuring how complex a piece of code is.
Caching is awesome. Instead of repeating an expensive operation, just reuse the result from last time! But properly using cache can be tricky… But there are a couple of things I’d like to not have to deal with:
If you’ve ever been far away from someone you want to communicate with, you’ll know how annoying daylight saving times & timezones make it to coordinate time across the world.
You don’t want your users to have to have to reason about that, so you’ll have to make your application do the work for them & display them the time at their location.
Dealing with time isn’t necessarily difficult, you just have to be consistent.
I recently pushed some PHP code to cluster coordinates that helped me cope with hundreds of thousands of geographic locations.
Turns out drawing all of those on a map isn’t that trivial…
The world of JavaScript has had promises since long, in the form of libraries like Q, BlueBird and many others, like jQuery’s deferred. And it’s been native in JavaScript for awhile now.
I love them!
