The following is inspired by the article “It’s the future” from Circle CI. You can read the original here. This piece is just an opinion, and like any JavaScript framework, it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. No JavaScript frameworks were created during the writing of this article.

In this talk I am going to walk the audience through the techniques used in major frontend frameworks - namely dirty checking, virtual-dom diffing and dependency-tracking. I will also compare them in different use case scenarios to give users a balanced idea of how each strategy performs under different circumstances.  

Drawing these is a fun puzzle – I can’t draw most things (a cat? forget it!) so I need to figure out which things are within my capabilities (a lighting bolt? stars? hearts? okay!) and will communicate what I want. 

I have one main opinion about programming and it’s – understanding the underlying systems you use (the kernel, the operating system, the network layers, your database, HTTP, whatever you’re running on top of) is essential if you want to do amazing work and be able to fix hard problems. It’s served me well so far.

Last week I created a small ps clone in ruby. This was done purely out of curiosity, just wondering how does ps works and how it knows all about current running processes. You can find the project here. Cool things I learned in the process:

• procfs is a virtual filesystem that stores process data!
• ps clone is merely file reading (really).

WiFi operates in the unlicensed ISM spectrum; it is trivial to deploy by anyone, anywhere; and the required hardware is simple and cheap. Not surprisingly, it has become one of the most widely deployed and popular wireless standards.

Netcat is a terminal application that is similar to the telnet program but has lot more features. Its a “power version” of the traditional telnet program. Apart from basic telnet functions it can do various other things like creating socket servers to listen for incoming connections on ports, transfer files from the terminal etc. So it is a small tool that is packed with lots of features. Therefore its called the “Swiss-army knife for TCP/IP”.

PostGIS stores and queries for information about location and mapping and provides spatial objects (geometry, geography, and raster as well as others) for the PostgreSQL object-relational database. It also adds functions, operators, and index enhancements to these spatial types that augment the power of the core PostgreSQL DBMS, making it a fast, feature-rich, and robust spatial database management system.

Manual DOM manipulation is messy and keeping track of the previous DOM state is hard. A solution to this problem is to write your code as if you were recreating the entire DOM whenever state changes. Of course, if you actually recreated the entire DOM every time your application state changed, your app would be very slow and your input fields would lose focus.

virtual-dom is a collection of modules designed to provide a declarative way of representing the DOM for your app. So instead of updating the DOM when your application state changes, you simply create a virtual tree or VTree, which looks like the DOM state that you want. virtual-dom will then figure out how to make the DOM look like this efficiently without recreating all of the DOM nodes.