Top all-time · #8502
Adrian Rossouw
Personal blog · daemon.co.zaprogrammingweb
Adrian Rossouw writes Daemon.co.za, a personal blog at daemon.co.za about programming and web. Since 2012, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “Simple and Easy: a Vocabulary to Describe Software Complexity”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's post on escaping JavaScript callback hell as an example of a lightweight way to handle flow control. One commenter points to it as the approach to follow after listing flow-control libraries.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Online Presence of Adrian Rossouw
Most-linked posts?
- Simple and Easy: a Vocabulary to Describe Software Complexity2 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-03-24
- CDN-hosted JavaScript Represents an Additional Point of Failure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-14
What Hacker News says?
man. i've been thinking about this stuff a lot. especially after I saw rich hickey's presentation "simple made easy" (my notes on it [1]). I'm actually on a mission now to find ways to do things that are more straight forward. One of my finds is [2] 'microservices', which I think will resonate with how I perceive software these days. [1] http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-de... [2] http://mart…
Comment linking /2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-describe-software-complexity
on “Toward a better programming”Submitted Complexity Creeps: Why I'm Concerned for the Future of Angular.js as a story · 96 points
HN discussionCode doesn't matter, what matters is what it does. How usable, secure, stable or fast it is are properties of how well it accomplishes it's task. There's an amazing presentation by the author of Clojure called Simple Made Easy. Since I couldn't just link people to a 1 hour presentation, I made some notes on it : http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-de... The code that we write he calls a constru…
Comment linking /2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-describe-software-complexity
on “Those Who Say Code Does Not Matter”Submitted I was wrong to be afraid of Angular.js as a story · 50 points
HN discussion> You should aim for simplicity and over the years I have learned that simplicity is far more easily attained by time spent working and refactoring than hours of pure thought and “brilliance”. Yup. It was Rich Hickey's presentation "Simple Made Easy" that finally allowed me to put it into words. I got so frustrated about only having a 1 hour presentation to link people to, that I ended up writing some notes to be ab…
Comment linking /2014/03/how-complexity-affects-software/
on “How to be a great software developer”Submitted Why I was Wrong to be Afraid of Angular.js, Part 2 as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThere are alternatives that don't require extending the language or having to work directly with a mess of nested callbacks. A bunch of flow-control libraries here: http://dailyjs.com/2012/02/20/new-flow-control-libraries/ This is definitely more hairy to use than if the language supported it natively, but not so bad, and can be implemented in a very lightweight way (this approach http://daemon.co.za/2012/04/simple-…
Comment linking /2012/04/simple-async-with-only-underscore/
on “Escape from Callback Hell: Callbacks are the modern goto”Submitted I Was Afraid of Angular.js Because it Reminded me of Drupal as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSo this is something I wrote last week relating how I've come to believe that it's really not appropriate to rely on vendor code on public CDN's for anything more complex than a JSFiddle. http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/from-trenches-js-cdn-point-of-fa... Basically, if you need to include something like jquery, you have to have code that makes use of it. Since by definition, you can't serve that code from a public cdn,…
Comment linking /2014/03/from-trenches-js-cdn-point-of-failure
on “JsDelivr – The advanced open source public CDN”Submitted OF MONKEYS AND MICROSERVICES as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI'm feeling like a bit of a spammer posting about this so often, but I think it's just coming up so often because it's a real need. I've started writing a series of posts about the fundamentals of full-stack development. It came out of what I have been explaining some students I have been mentoring recently. http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundament... My goal is to explain the different layers, t…
Comment linking /2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundamentals/
on “A New Codecademy”Submitted CDN-hosted JavaScript Represents an Additional Point of Failure as a story · 10 points
HN discussionthanks! I'll take a look at it. I use elasticsearch for adhoc querying : http://daemon.co.za/2012/05/elasticsearch-5-minutes/ And couchdb does have atomic in-place updates, http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Document_Update_Handlers I used the latter recently to track the last view-time on images, as well as to build a schema migration routine in like 100 lines of code. edit fixed link
Comment linking /2012/05/elasticsearch-5-minutes/
on “MongoDB 2.6 Released”Submitted Of Monkeys and Microservices: An Introduction as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSo i've been trying to find an the ideal case for mongodb, because I have to teach a nosql database to some people I am mentoring. I'm leaning heavily towards couchdb though. http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/when-is-mongodb-the-right-tool
Comment linking /2014/04/when-is-mongodb-the-right-tool
on “MongoDB 2.6 Released”Submitted Simple and Easy: a Vocabulary to Describe Software Complexity as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis is a really useful resource. I've started to do something quite similar on my blog. I've been mentoring some web developers who only know html+css, and i've been using the time to write about the whole stack. My goal is to build a roadmap, not to write a recipe book. I've just started, but this is going to be a very useful reference for when I need to explain some of the more complex ideas. http://daemon.co.za/…
Comment linking /2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundamentals/
on “Computer Science from the Bottom Up”Submitted Werewolves.io – WebRTC party game for 7-16 players as a story · 7 points
HN discussionEssentially that. That simple/easy terminology I mentioned before actually has this as one of it's conclusions: http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/how-complexity-affects-software/
Comment linking /2014/03/how-complexity-affects-software/
on “Programming Languages are the Least Usable, but Most Powerful User Interfaces”Submitted Show HN: Mirror Tumblr Photo Blogs with Browsr as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYeah. I've come to realize that the hard way. It is also what it comes down to w.r.t. code-over-config. To make a system sufficiently configurable, you end up having to re-invent a turing complete language inside it's configuration files, so it starts looking more like lisp. This is due to the [1] Inner Platform effect. The only interfaces I know of that's expressive enough to drive a turing complete language is eit…
Comment linking /2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-describe-software-complexity
on “Programming Languages are the Least Usable, but Most Powerful User Interfaces”Submitted Full-Stack Fundamentals: Introduction as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI had the same feeling as you. I became ok with it after I realized it could be removed in the future. http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/why-wrong-to-be-afraid-angular I am looking forward to trying react though, because of how well it plays with backbone (which is still my preference)
Comment linking /2014/03/why-wrong-to-be-afraid-angular
on “The Road to React 1.0”Submitted When is MongoDB the Right Tool for the Job? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhave you met my friend [1] browserify? I'm probably not the audience for require.js, because I've never had a situation where I was forced to not have a build step. Once you just accept that there's always a build step, life becomes so much easier. [1] http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/subtly-meta-introduction-to-brow...
Comment linking /2014/03/subtly-meta-introduction-to-browserify
on “Complexity Creeps: Why I'm Concerned for the Future of Angular.js”Submitted Post-Mortem: Real-Time Fridge Poetry in Just 48 Hours as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYeah. I was mostly concerned about the fact that nobody was pointing this out. If you read the [1] previous post you will see that I am remarkably positive about it. My concern was that the answer to working around the DI hack was always "dont do that". Even ngmin is just a really elaborate way to 'dont do that'. With it's own issue queue and grunt plugin and almost 22000 hits on google. From working on open source…
Comment linking /2014/03/why-wrong-to-be-afraid-angular
on “Complexity Creeps: Why I'm Concerned for the Future of Angular.js”Submitted The Rise of Microservices as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've actually spent the last month doing the same. I started blogging. just to decompress, and figure out what i've learnt over my career. I actually think it's allowed me to rediscover my voice, and i just... i have so much to say. I didn't expect that. It's been very freeing, and I think possibly life changing. http://daemon.co.za
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Will soon have lots of time and little money – how to spend it?”Submitted What does "Full-Stack" mean? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion