Game Lines made with CoffeeScript and Stylus

Try my game Lines at http://skovalyov.github.com/game-lines.

The source code is available at https://github.com/skovalyov/game-lines.

A lot of improvements to be done, but you can already play!

I plan to optimize for mobile, make the animation smoother, handle game over properly, introduce different complexity levels and high scores: global, today and probably personal.

Stay tuned and you are welcome to join!

How to format the time span between now and the date specified in a "Facebook way"

Recently I was looking for some method to format the time span between now and the date specified in a "Facebook way". There are some, but none was completely what I was looking for. So I have decided to create mine. Moreover, it's not that complicated:

Do not comment code!

Commenting code is the worst practice promoted by "wannabe smart" books about software engineering. Joshua Block in his How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters keynote notes that code should read like prose and shows the good example:

And I completely agree with this statement. Thus good code is self-explanatory and does not require comments. On the other hand comments will never rescue bad code. Sure, we can use something like "TODO: I will fix this dummy trick in the next iteration", but no more than it.

Second Ukrainian Flash Platform User Group official meeting

This time Ukrainian Flash Platform User Group meeting has been held in Kiev. Two previous meetings have been held in Kharkov. We have gathered at cozy Golden Gate Pub of Mirovaya Karta chain near Golden Gates. Ilya Panin from Kharkov has compared different IDEs (Adobe Flex Builder, FDT, FlashDevelop, IDEA) and summarized that as a whole Adobe Flex Builder is the best choice to develop Flex applications now. Tatyana Belaya from Moscow has told about sound visualization using SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() method with snowflakes on background. Roman Shuper has shared his experience using Apache Ant to deploy Flex projects and also told about conditional compilation and running executables from AIR applications.

Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices

Adobe has published Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices. Now it is mostly about ActionScript 3.0. I work in a team for a long time, so we have created our own conventions long time ago, because it is a must for collaborative development. It is based on ActionScript 2.0 Best Practices, Code Conventions for the Java Programming Language and the common sense. Nevertheless, it's a great effort from Adobe, because vendor supported guidelines are always more respected and tend to become industry standard. Now I hope Adobe would also extend the document with MXML conventions.