Rob Janssen (RobIII)

In CSS, “px” is not an angular measurement and it is not non-linear : A Blog About Stuff

There’s a wild meme on the loose. A significant number of people seem to have decided that “px” in CSS is an angular unit rather than a unit of length, and moreover that it is in some sense “non-linear”. This is wrong – WRONG! Confusion runs deep and common sense is imperiled.

So, you want to write an HTTP Client

It's a rare website or company today that doesn't have to make HTTP requests to another party. Phone apps need to communicate with a server. Servers have to communicate with 3rd party tools like Facebook, Twitter, Sendgrid, (Twilio!) and others.

Abstracting Control Flow

Any programmer, even if she doesn’t see it this way, constantly creates abstractions.

Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming

Abject-oriented programming is a set of practices for encouraging code reuse and making sure programmers are producing code that can be used in production for a long time.

What Makes a Good Programmer Good?

I’ve worked with a lot of programmers over the years — some of them super amazing, and some distinctly lackluster. As I’ve had the pleasure of working with some very skilled individuals recently, I spent some time thinking about what I admire in them.

It’s the little things, Pt. 1: How small conundrums make many hate computers

There's a song in the Rogers and Hammerstein classic South Pacific that perfectly encapsulates the point of this article and the three-part-series it belongs to. It's called "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught." You've got to be carefully taught.

Why Many Developers Hate ASP.NET… and Why They’re Wrong

Few platforms draw the same amount of ire as ASP.NET (or .NET in general) from the development community. While there are certainly valid criticisms of the platform (what platform doesn’t?), the majority of negativity comes from those who haven’t spent any time with .NET.

Understanding CPU Steal – An Experiment

Recently at Stackdriver, we wanted to understand the metric of “CPU steal”.  We knew that it was a relatively recent addition to the Unix method of tracking CPU usage, and we knew that it was introduced with the growing use of virtualization.

What Are You The World's Foremost Authority Of?

I was given a series of animals, with some art for each, and my job was to make them move around in ways that looked believable. Well, as believable as you could get on a 16-bit game system. It was more about giving the impression of how fish would swim in a river than being truly realistic.

PhysicsJS (Yes, a JavaScript Physics engine)

In today's Web Wednesday post we're highlighting something you might think a little oxymoronic, a JavaScript Physics engine. It's still in an Alpha status, but even so, it's looking pretty cool...