Creative Programming

Since a couple of years, I am the maintainer of the NodeJS library called node-gd, which are JavaScript bindings for NodeJS to the libgd graphics library. During the past years, many major changes have taken place in the code base of node-gd to keep it up to date with the pace of JavaScript evolution. In this article I will go deeper into the technical changes that I implemented in the past years. It is not an explanation of how node-gd works or what you can do with it. For that I would suggest to directly visit its documentation page

butje.nl is one of my sites that is longest online, sinds 2003! It’s also one of my favourites: I like to browse through the photos of Berndnaut, Jeroen and me and the history of our friendship.

In the beginning I built it with Adobe GoLive, later in the PHP framework Symfony 1.0 and now I’m back to a site consisting of static HTML files, rendered by just 250 lines of NodeJS! Different considerations at different moments of my coding career lead to these descisions…

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I’m not from the generation that really wrote leet online, nor can’t I say I master it. But nevertheless, as an alternative script for latin characters, 1337 or leet or eleet or 31337 speak opens up a lot of nice alternative ways of writing. With the wide support of UTF-8, the “traditional” ASCII-based leetspeak can be extended with UTF-8 quite easily.

My first 1337 PHP class dates from about 2008, which is 10 years ago. Since then I’ve learned a lot, and not only in programming of course. Let’s bring the old code to 2018, let’s JavaScriptify it!

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Twitter bots are all around. I love them. I made some, and I follow a lot of them. Some time after π-day (or pi-day) last March (it’s March 14th every year), I came upon the idea to create a Twitter bot that posts irregularly decimals of π. It starts, of course, with π and a lot of its decimals…

module.exports = '3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399';

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I’ve got this domain name already eleven years. Quite some different layouts have been here. Also, a lot of different content has been shown. Most of the smaller projects I’ve put online are located in sub folders of this root and are not referenced anymore. I had the idea to make a roundup, a cleanup and a blog post about some of them. Checkout out for example my Leetifyer!

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I decided, in advance of If Hemingway Wrote Javascript, to start rewriting parts of my own code. I was delighted to see the variaty of implementations of algorithms within the book. Wether it is a good or bad part of JavaScript that anything can be written in different ways, why then settle with the first result of my own coding? Why not give it another take?

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It was not a big surprise to read that Angus Croll is from the UK. Since he’s an employee of Twitter, my first guess was he’d be an American, but after reading a couple of chapters in If Hemingway wrote JavaScript, I found that hard to believe, since his vocabulary is more similar to the lists of words I had to learn in high school, than to what you regularly hear on Dutch television of US sitcoms.

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In my rondup of day one of Fronteers Conference 2014 I tried to touch most speakers at least briefly. For day two I want to do the same. As said, Fronteers 2014 is a well organised conference and one of high quality: speakers from Twitter, Google and Etsy are part of the line up. In addition to that it is held in a beautiful venue and a good lunch is served!

#fronteers14 @necolas: Building a web app without any components is like assembling a radio from… this. pic.twitter.com/kGPuJN4VyK

— Arjan Eising (@eising) 10 oktober 2014

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