"behavior" entries

What it really means when people say “Everything in JavaScript is an object”

A new mantra for your next (programming) meditation session.

When you begin programming with JavaScript you might run across books, tutorials, and people who say “Everything in JavaScript is an object.” While it’s not 100% true (not *everything* is an object), it is *mostly* true. And sometimes this can be a bit surprising.

For instance, to most people functions and objects look and act completely different. And in many languages, functions and objects *are* completely different. However, in JavaScript, a function is an object. This can take a bit of concentrated attention to get your head around, but it’s an important concept because it’s the secret behind another big topic in JavaScript: functions as first class values.

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Exploring lightweight monitoring systems

Toward unifying customer behavior and operations metrics.

lightweight_systemsFor the last ten years I’ve had a foot in both the development and operations worlds. I stumbled into the world of IT operations as a result of having the most UNIX skills in the team shortly after starting at ThoughtWorks. I was fortunate enough to do so at a time when many of my ThoughtWorks colleagues and I where working on the ideas which were captured so well in Jez Humble and Dave Farley’s Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley).

During this time, our focus was on getting our application into production as quickly as possible. We were butting up against the limits of infrastructure automation and IaaS providers like Amazon were only in their earliest form.

Recently, I have spent time with operations teams who are most concerned with the longer-term challenges of looking after increasingly complex ecosystems of systems. Here the focus is on immediate feedback and knowing if they need to take action. At a certain scale, complex IT ecosystems can seem to exhibit emergent behavior, like an organism. The operations world has evolved a series of tools which allow these teams to see what’s happening *right now* so we can react, keep things running, and keep people happy.

At the same time, those of us who spend time thinking about how to quickly and effectively release our applications have become preoccupied with wanting to know if that software does what our customers want once it gets released. The Lean Startup movement has shown us the importance of putting our software in front of our customers, then working out how they actually use it so we can determine what to do next. In this world, I was struck by the shortcomings of the tools in this space. Commonly used web analytics tools, for example, might only help me understand tomorrow how my customers used my site today.

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Dos and don’ts in JavaScript

A few best practices for when you're learning the language


With every programming language, there’s a list of do’s and don’ts and JavaScript is no exception. Some of these best practices are there for your protection (like always always always using semi-colons!); some to make your code more readable and less error-prone; and some to increase the efficiency of your code. Read more…

I just slipped on a banana peel named “this”

Keeping track of this in your JavaScript code

In JavaScript, the special variable this is used to refer an object. But which object this refers too depends on the code you’re executing and how this is used. So, a common problem for those learning JavaScript is keeping track of the value of this in different situations. You can be happily testing your code, and then – bam! Suddenly, things stop working, and you’re wondering what happened, not realizing that you’re assuming this is set to one value, when in fact, it’s an entirely different value. And, bugs caused by confusion about this are notoriously difficult to track down.
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What is that upside-down tree doing in my browser?

Start using JavaScript to create dynamic web pages by updating the DOM.

The secret to getting your web pages to do your bidding with code is to use JavaScript to manipulate the Document Object Model, or DOM. The DOM is an upside-down tree-like structure that the browser uses to represent your web page internally, and it’s by getting and setting values in the DOM that you can modify your web page in response to users doing things like clicking a button, moving the mouse, or dragging an element around.

Getting started with the DOM is easy once you understand how the browser translates your HTML into this internal structure made of objects. Once these objects are created, then you can manipulate them using a wide variety of properties and methods, to change the content of an element, to add a style to an element, or even remove an element from the page completely.

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Wait, where is my variable defined?

Learn JavaScript scope so you always know where your variables are defined

You may have noticed that Head First JavaScript Programming is released! Now that the book is done, we’ve got a few more Head First JavaScript Programming teasers for you. The book is aimed at those of you who are learning JavaScript from the ground up, and our goal with these teasers is to tease out a few characteristics of the language that might surprise you, trip you up, or that you might want to pay special attention to as you learn.

Whether you’re coming to JavaScript from another language, or you’re learning JavaScript as your first language, the way scope works — that is, when and where your variables are defined — might surprise you. Scope in JavaScript isn’t always intuitive, and it’s easy to make some simple mistakes that can cause your code to work in unexpected ways.

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Self-Adaptive Is Not The Same As Feedback

Favoring behavior over environment

In a series of posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6), we have introduced the idea of feedback control as a way to keep complex systems on track, even when subject to uncertainty and change.

It is easy to be confused at this point, and to think that feedback is nothing more than an “adaptive system” that can modify its behavior in response to changes in its environment. But that would not be right. It depends on what quantity you are monitoring! A feedback system does not respond to changes in the environment—a feedback system changes specifically in response to changes in its own behavior. That’s a big difference.

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Purposeful Design Principles for Behavior Change

How to design products and services that help users change behavior

Steve Wendel (@sawendel) is the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet where he develops applications that help users take control of their finances. He’s also currently writing Designing for Behavior Change. I recently sat down to talk with Steve about the importance of testing and iteration, role of psychology, and resources and tools.

Key highlights include:

  • Describing the general principles of designing for behavior change. [Discussed at 0:16]
  • When we get it wrong, how to turn it around. [Discussed at 2:12]
  • Good examples of products and services. [Discussed at 4:45]
  • Read more…

JavaScript Flexibility: Fun, But Use with Care

JavaScript is dynamically typed

When you begin programming in JavaScript, you’ll need to use variables. A variable is just a bit of storage to hold a value. Just about every line of code you write will use a variable of one kind or another, so it’s a good idea to get familiar with the kinds of things you can put in variables, and how you can use them. Now, if you’re coming from another programming language, like Java, you might be surprised to see how loose JavaScript is about variables and their type. JavaScript doesn’t care if your variable starts out with a string value, and ends up being a number: JavaScript’s dynamically typed.

In this installment of Head First JavaScript Programming Teasers, you’ll learn about the basics of variables, how JavaScript is dynamically typed, and why it’s a good idea to stick with one type for your variables.

JavaScript Makes Browsers Behave

Start adding functionality to your HTML and CSS with JavaScript

If you know HTML and CSS, you’re ready to begin learning JavaScript. But you might be surprised, because JavaScript looks quite different from both HTML and CSS. That’s because JavaScript is a language for computation. Unlike HTML, which is for marking up content to add meaning and structure to that content, and CSS, which is a set of declarative rules for adding style to selected elements, JavaScript is for describing computation: it’s a language for describing how things get done.

A JavaScript program consists of a series of statements, each of which does a little bit of computation. A statement might store some data in a variable, or modify data with an expression, or make a decision about what to do based on the value of a variable, or even tell the browser to do something, like pop up an alert.

Want to know more? In part four of Head First JavaScript Programming Teasers, Eric shows you how JavaScript is different from HTML and CSS, and why. He also steps you through a simple example of JavaScript code, so you can get a taste of how it works.