Elf Sternberg

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!‘ (‘I found it!’) but rather ‘hmm….that’s funny…’” – Isaac Asimov I had that very experience this evening.  It’s funny what gives you insight, what makes you understand.  I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the whole idea [...]

Last night, I was working on a little demonstration project, teaching myself the intricacies of Backbone/CouchDB interaction. I wrote my first CouchDB views and figured out what they’re for, which is a massive step toward world domination and all that. I was working on the retrieval layer, and thinking about the create/update features, when I [...]

The other day, I posted a chunk of code called Switchboard, which was all about using Nodejitsu’s node-http-proxy. I turns out there’s a much easier way. HttpProxy.createServer will create an empty routing proxy, and when you ask for a backend handler that isn’t present, node-http-proxy will automagically build one using internal defaults. So, really, your [...]

tl;dr version: We recently replaced our Nginx with an HTTP reverse proxy written entirely in Node.js. We leveraged Nodejitsu’s node-http-proxy, and added our own logic to provide a useful switchboard for several small HTTP servers, each of which “does one thing well,” in the Coffeescript programming language. There are three scenarios where a reverse proxy [...]

This is a simple little program that I wrote mostly to practice using Coffeescript, Node, and Promises. I have a lot of little web projects going on all the time on my PC, and keeping track of them all is a sometimes difficult task. I wanted to make that task easier. The basics of the [...]

TL;DR version: Down at the bottom is a simple naive RSS proxy written in Coffeescript for Node.js, written as an example.  I explain how to install Node and Coffeescript, and how the proxy works. There’s a lovely blog out there, Elegant Code, which has a series entitled “Baby Steps with Node.JS.”   There are a [...]

Introduction To Version 2.0, Modern Edition. When I wrote the original Backbone Store, I didn’t have a clear understanding of how Backbone worked.  I wrote it to teach myself Backbone, after all.  Since then, I’ve come to understand that there is some Javascript about which I didn’t have the world’s clearest understanding.  This version of the [...]

You’re a geek in need of a job. In the meantime, you need to convince unemployment insurance that you’re looking for a job. For the latter, you need to send out a few resumes every week, and go to any interviews that arise as a result of your efforts. For both of these, RSS is [...]

The title is tongue-in-cheek, but take it in good faith: your most ardent users, the ones who link to you and provide you with both traffic and search engine legitimacy, can also be your biggest nightmares. Because when they link to you, they won’t just link to your home page. They’ll link to what they [...]

In case you’ve been under a rock, the jQuery team released version 1.5 this afternoon, and in a move that took me completely by surprise, jQuery 1.5 includes Futures and Promises. Well, that’s fine, but what the Heck are futures and promises? A Promise is a proxy for a result that hasn’t arrived yet. In [...]