Month: January 2013
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Should everyone learn to code?
I posted this the other day, blissfully unaware of how contentious it would be: “Learning to code is non-optional in the 21st century.” It’s a piece of hyperbole, of course; learning to code is perfectly optional. Nobody’s pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to do it. But here’s what many of my […]
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Disrupt the mainstream
“Mainstream culture,” as a concept, needs to die. A little pre-history. The Diamond Sutra, a sacred Buddhist text and the world’s oldest surviving printed book, was produced in China in 868 AD. It took another couple of hundred years before moveable type was invented, and another four hundred years for the printing press to be […]
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Using PHP closures with the observer pattern
PHP 5.3 introduced the concept of anonymous functions, often called closures. These have been present in languages like JavaScript for a long time, and have been incorporated into PHP as part of its ongoing transformation into a first-class web programming language. Simply put, they allow you to assign the workings of a function to a […]
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Aaron’s army
This speech, in honor of Aaron Swartz, pretty much sums up why I work on the web. This is why it’s worthwhile. Aaron was part of an army of citizens that believes democracy only works when the citizenry are informed, when we know about our rights—and our obligations. An army that believes we must make […]