Category: Nerdy

  • Into the Wookies

    Into the Wookies

    I’m currently reading Into the Woods by John Yorke, a treatise on storytelling  and story structure, by an author with extensive experience writing for British TV. It’s a well written and interesting book, one which gives you plenty of food for thought, even if you find yourself questioning the author’s theories. I encountered one such moment early […]

  • Innovation vs execution, and the myth of the big idea

    Google’s recent acquisition of Nest for $3.2bn has raised some eyebrows, with some people questioning whether the valuation is sensible, and questioning how innovative Nest’s products really are. One comment I read claimed they did nothing that hadn’t been thought up years ago. In terms of the valuation, it is a high figure, and perhaps […]

  • JavaScript subclassing using Object.create

    In my previous post, I talked about how Microsoft’s TypeScript was able to build simple class-based inheritance on top of JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance. To recap, the compiler includes a short function named extends that handles rejigging the prototype chain between the sub-class and the super-class to achieve the desired inheritance. [javascript] var __extends = this.__extends […]