When you normally develop, assumptions are made in about the behavior of each function you call and each class you instantiate. If you are using a well published API those assumptions are safe assumptions. These assumptions are documented in the API documentation. They have been throughly tested by the API developers and so they are known to work. What about the programming constructs in your application that you wrote? Are you absolutely sure that they do what they say they do? For example, you may create an function called add(). You may just have a return statement that adds two variables. But what if you wanted that function to also be able to handle non-numeric additions. What if you wanted it to add two vectors or two complex numbers? Normally those assumptions would be a made in the writers mind as a fog of thought that lead to the act of typing the code. When someone else reads the code again, they form assumptions on how they expect the code to function based on their impression of what the application should be doing and how the code should have been written. Writing unit tests is the act of making those assumptions explicit. I think it is wrong to call test as “tests”. I feel it is more appropriate to call them assumptions or expectations.

Reddit if you haven’t heard is where all the action is these days on the internet. Apart from that blackhole of the Internet called 4chan, it is the most happening place. I have tried many times to quit reddit but I am not able to. I thought I would take a little time and explain why I like reddit so much: I meet a lot of people that are like me.

Expression Of Subtle Thoughts

People express very intimate and subtle thoughts that I am sure everyone has but we never acknowledge. This to me is the biggest reason for why I am on reddit. I like to read about about all the thoughts that other people have when they experience many life experiences. The thought you feel when you [some mundane activity] to [life changing outcome].

Alternative View Points

Reddit I have found is a great place to find an alternative view point to almost any topic. People express many perspectives on an issue and are surprisingly knowledgeable.

Stories

Reddit is an enormous collection of life experiences of so many people. Sure, a great number of the stories are probably fake. But I find many stories posted by other users eerily similar to my own experiences.

Education

It is very educational to read some of the many sub reddits in reddit. I am a fan of the technology and science subreddit as well as the ones for some games like half life, bioshock and such. There are many small communities there that it is amazing. Reading the TODAYILEARNED section is really incredible. It really shapes your point of view about the world given the nature of many of the things that are posted there run against the common notion of how the world runs.

WorldNews

The worldnews section of the website is a way to get an alternative right-wing-ish viewpoint of the world. It is an alternative western-tilted view point and not a balanced one. What becomes popular there is what suits a particular world-view. It is the worldview of the slightly naive mid to late 20s individual who was born in the 80s, probably geeky, probably idealistic, atheistic, westernized and tech savvy. There is a community for everything.

What effect has reddit had on me?

Forgiving of Self - I am a lot more forgiving of myself. I am a lot more forgiving of my feelings I don’t feel like I should be ashamed of having some needs that I do. I noticed that as a result of reading reddit, I am able to be better aware of my feeling and thoughts. It makes me realize that I should blog more and write more of my thoughts here or on my personal blog. I have learned that Americans are very expressive of their thoughts and learnt the advantage of being like that. I learnt the advantage of expression. Lot More Expressive - I am a lot more expressive of what I feel. This I believe is something that is unique to americans. They are very expressive. This I believe is something that is very important for me as an Indian because in India’s culture expression is not encouraged. It is just not encouraged, people actively work against it. The act of putting something in expression puts people on the defensive. Beware though! But do be aware that you could end up wasting long long hours at reddit. While it is a good pass time, it can be a bottom less pit. It is like an internet of its own. There are so many obscure sub-reddits that will suit your most mildest interests. It is mostly comprised of people of mid to late 20s – people born in the 1980s. So you are likely to get a little too comfortable with your faults and failures while  on reddit since it creates an impression that there are so many people in the world that share your faults.

Twitter bootstrap is suddenly, for the second time, getting a lot of attention from a lot of people. Some popular ideas floating around the hackerwebz are:

1. Don’t Use Twitter Bootstrap Like A Million Other Websites -  One argument is that using Twitter bootstrap makes your website seem immediately recognizable as a Twitter Bootstrap website. 
2. People Like The Websites Made With Twitter Bootstrap – The websites and applications made with Twitter bootstrap are great and they look good.

What do I make of it?

1. There was a time when I was able to recognize that my friend’s digital logic assignment was a copy paste of a Wikipedia article in a fraction of a second. That’s what’s happening here. Except other developers, no one else, especially not your target users are going to know that you used twitter bootstrap.
2. Most people don’t understand what Twitter bootstrap is. You’d be surprised how few people actually understand what it really is. I have seen people in high end IT consulting think it is some tool that will save developers from cross platform inconsistencies.
3. Twitter bootstrap is good enough. It solves a problem – make a good looking app without having to design it and having to learn CSS. But it encourages a lot of bad practices. I am a big fan of semantic mark-up. I want my HTML to read like XML. I may use it myself in a project of mine in the future.
4. Putting any dumb idea in writing and having it trend in hacker news is enough to get some importance attached to the message. Some people will actually start believing that shit.

Grid layouts seem to be a new fad in web development. There is massive misunderstanding of them too. I am not going to establish what they are. I’ll get straight to the point:

Grid Frameworks Are Not An Alternative To Knowing CSS

Grid frameworks give you a shortcut to laying things on the screen. You don’t have to specify dimensions or percentage widths for the page to lay things on the screen, you can just use the following code, including the grid framework css using a link tag and start seeing things fall in place.

<div class="row">
   <div class="span2">some content goes here</span>
   <div class="span4">some other content goes here</span>
</span>

In other words, grids are being used as glorified tables. I have run into a lot of people who say laying things out using a table is an awful despicable practice but these people won’t flinch before using the new awesome shiny spanking grid framework to layout a non-grid visual design. Problems with grid frameworks:

1. they are the same thing as tables. They mix layout information with presentation mark-up.
2. they don’t describe the content that it encloses.
3. they are often misunderstood as the tool

I was in a project once where one of the more influential members insisted that I use twitter bootstrap for its grid framework because of he thought it would ensure that the application rendered uniformly across the screen. Not only was this a misguided approach, using a grid framework to code a non-grid framework is actually more work than if no grids were used.

What are grid layouts?

Grid layout is a visual design paradigm where the elements on a page are laid out vertically and horizontally to make it easy on the eyes to scan the content. They have nothing to do with “cross-browser uniformity”. No I don’t mean that grid layouts are reserved for those designs where the elements line up vertically. I am saying that, in keeping with front-end engineering best practices,  you should be implementing that design in XHTML/CSS using proper naming of the class and id names that describe the content anyway. Don’t ever use grid frameworks. They are not to be used. Unless you WANT an alternative to typing css, if you find that using grid layout makes your life easy when trying to quickly code up the application’s UI then go right ahead. Just know that you are using a shortcut and not implementing a grid design. (Which is okay. What are we as hackers if we can’t reuse tools for ways other than intended?)

A layout engine is the software component that is responsible for rendering web pages. It takes XHTML/CSS that it receives from the server corresponding to a URL. There are currently 3 major layout engines:

• Gecko – Gecko is the rendering engine used in the Firefox and Seamonkey browsers.
• Webkit – Webkit is the rendering engine used in Chrome, Safari, Android web browser and iPhone web browser
• Trident – Trident is the rendering engine embedded in Microsoft Internet Explorer

A rendering engine provides 80% of the browsers functionality. Without it, all you have are the address bar, browser back buttons and status bar if any. I am tempted to say it IS the browser. But there are other components like:

1. Javascript Engine – The component that executes Javascript embedded in web pages.
2. User interface for the browser – The back, forward buttons of the browser.