Best tracks of 2012
Kendrick Lamar - Swimming Pools (Drank)
You want me to contribute? It’ll cost ya.
We are in the era of user-generated-content sites. Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter are all examples of this. It is a trend that is on the rise, and for a good reason: it’s a lot more rewarding when you can contribute to a site, rather than just consume content. It’s create a more vibrant, active user base.
And some sites have decided to show their appreciation by offering revenue showing programs with their users. The biggest example is YouTube: where many people make a living off the videos they create there. But it’s not something that has become common practice across the web, and I think that will change in the near future.
Users are getting more and more choices in sites to spend their time on. If one site offers a revenue sharing program, that can be a very enticing feature. As someone who been creating videos steadily over the last few years, I can say I would definitely choose YouTube over another online video provider given that this program exists.
And I think it is just a matter of time before other sites will need to offer a similar program to compete. It might be hard to see now, but the web is still in its infancy, and as the web matures, users will expect something in return for sites they contribute to. Just my two cents. What do you think?
My caffeine addiction
Since libraries like Backbone and Ember.JS have surged in popularity, and web apps are becoming more and more JS intensive, I think it’s worth making a post about my experience with CoffeScript.
I was strongly against CoffeScript for the longest time. And it seems there are a number of people who are against it as well. But eventually I decided to give it a shot, since everything should be evaluated before a considerable opinion can be formed.
I took to it immediately, and I now use it in place of Javascript wherever I can. One of the features I love is the white-space based nature of the language. Code without brackets or semi-colons is typically easier to read and process. Although once you get to three or four nested ‘if’ statements, I sometimes find it troublesome to process. But I don’t typically need that many nested statements, so that is not a common problem.
Another feature I love is the class system in CoffeScript. JS should have a extensive class system built in. But since it does not, CoffeScript comes in to the rescue!
CoffeScript makes my life easier, but there are still some features I dislike. Something I find unpleasant is the array and object syntax. I think that part should have been left untouched. The JS way was fine - it was intuitive, and straightforward. But that’s the way it is, and I think it would be hard for me to convince them to change it.
5 years from now
Does anyone else ever wonder what databases will be the most popular be in five years? Seeing as MongoDB spiked in popularity in the past few years, I start to wonder if maybe in five years, Mongo will be the most popular database of choice, and MySQL will be the least. It wouldn’t be impossible.
MongoDB is extremely easy to pick up. And while MySQL is a great database choice, it can get confusing to a beginner as soon as you start to get into JOINS and other semi-advanced topics. Something to think about.
PHP 5.5
As you may have heard, PHP 5.5.0 Alpha1 has been released. By the looks of it, it seems like it will bring some great features to the language. The new hashing API looks like it will provide hardened passwords without much additional effort - a plus for everyone, especially those that are new at PHP.
Many of the features I desired were already released in 5.4 - such as shorthand array syntax, and array dereferencing. But I’m always interested in seeing what PHP will bring next. Maybe one day they can eliminate superflous symbols like {, }, and ;? What if I say please?
Designed a new theme for my new blog
What do you think?
