One of JavaScript’s greatest strengths is its extremely powerful function syntax. You can use it to encapsulate portions of code, large or small, and pass these invocations around as any other object. node.js takes this and builds an entire API on top of it. This power is great, but unchecked, it can lead to convoluted and complex code, the “callback spaghetti” problem. Here’s a sample JavaScript function which chains together some asynchronous APIs.

function run() {
	doSomething(function(error, foo) {
		if (error) {
			// handle the error
		} else {
			doAnotherThing(function(error, bar) {
				if (error) {
					// handle the error
				} else {
					doAThirdThing(function(error, baz) {
						if (error) {
							// handle the error
						} else {
							// finish
						}
					});
				}
			});
		}
	});
}

async.js tries to fix this by providing APIs for structuring these steps in a more logical fashion while keeping the asynchronous design pattern that works so well. It offers a number of control flow management tools for running asynchronous operations serially, in parallel, or in a “waterfall” (where if any step has an error, the operation doesn’t continue). It also works with arrays, and can iterate over items, run map/reduce/filter operations, and sort arrays. It does all of this asynchronously, and returns the data in a structured manner. So the above code looks like this:

function run() {
	async.waterfall(
		[
			function(callback) {
				doSomething(function(error, foo) {
					callback(error, foo);
				});
			},
			function(foo, callback) {
				doAnotherThing(function(error, bar) {
					callback(error, foo, bar);
				});
			},
			function(foo, bar, callback) {
				doAThirdThing(function(error, baz) {
					callback(error, foo, bar, baz);
				});
			}
		],
		function(error, foo, bar, baz) {
			if (error) {
				// one of the steps had an error and failed early
			} else {
				// finish
			}
		}
	);
}

While the resulting code may be a little longer in terms of lines, it has a much more clearly defined structure, and the error cases are handled in one place, not three. This makes the code much more readable and maintainable. I love this pattern so much, I’ve begun porting it to Objective-C as IIIAsync. If you’re a JavaScript developer, and you use function for its more advanced use cases, you want to use async.js.

I grew up knowing how to play music. My parents started me on piano lessons when I was very young, and played violin in middle and high school. When I was in college, I taught myself how to be a human beatbox. Lately, my tastes in music have turned more towards the electronic spectrum; perhaps a fitting choice, given my software engineer background. For years, I’ve owned a copy of Apple’s Logic audio production app (Logic Express 8, and recently upgraded to Logic Pro 9). And while I had played with it on and off, I never really finished anything, due both to a perceived lack of skill and a lack of confidence in ability to actually make something worthwhile.

Fast forward to a time when the Korean pop song Gangnam Style by PSY has taken the Internet by storm, racking up a hundred million views in a few weeks. Mashups of this song came out quickly and by lots of people. I’ve had a fascination with this song since I’d first heard it. That everyone else was getting into mashups of a song I was completely hooked on created an itch in my brain to give it a try. At the very least, I could put some ideas in and see what happened; I was safe in my insecurity about my own ability because I never had to let another soul hear whatever came out.

Last weekend was the three-day-long Labor Day weekend, and I had nothing better to do. I spent Saturday putting the song together, combining the K-pop music track with vocals from LMFAO, Dev, the Offspring, and the Bloodhound Gang (as unlikely a combo as you’d expect to find in a mashup). I posted it to SoundCloud and got a bunch of positive feedback along with the constructive criticism. Over Sunday I tweaked a few things in the song. And on Monday, I decided to try and put a video together.The whole time my brain was fighting me to stop, to give up, to pretend I’d never tried, and forget it ever existed. But I kept pushing, and out came my first real mashup ever. And here it is.

Apologies to those in Germany, where the video is blocked for copyright reasons. You can download or stream the MP3 or the AAC audio for now.

I put this up on the Internet, tweeted a link, and waited for feedback. I wasn’t expecting much to happen; my wildest expectations were that it might get 10,000 views and maybe a link on Reddit’s mashups community. Barely even a splash. I had no delusions of grandeur about its value; I just wanted to play with some ideas, get a little experience, and pull this splinter out of my mind.

I was wrong. Very, very wrong. Once you put something on the Internet, you lose any control over what happens to it. Within an hour, my mashup had gotten posted to Buzzfeed where it quickly started to gain traction. Within 12 hours, it had grown to 8,000 views like it was nothing. Within 24 hours, that number shot past my crazy hopeful dream to 16,000. It hit Mashable and The Daily What. That number grew to 34,000. 44,000. 88,000. Blogs and news sites started posting it as their viral video of the day. Know Your Meme picked it up. Radio stations around the world started playing it. 104,000. 122,000.

Then, just as it seemed like it was peaking, something utterly unexpected and amazing happened.

Check out #PartyRock … Gangnam Style! bitly.com/PartyRockGangn…

— LMFAO (@LMFAO) September 7, 2012

And a few hours later, it got retweeted by the man himself, PSY, in what may become my favorite screenshot ever.

I never expected anything like this. Not at all. It is an incredible honor to have a mashup work celebrated and shared by an artist you took from, let alone two.

Throughout this whole experience, I’ve been floored by supporters. People on the Internet tend to tell you what they really think while hiding behind the shield of anonymity. So much to my surprise, the response has been phenomenal. There are over 5,000 likes of the video on YouTube, with 26 likes for every dislike. It’s been shared on Facebook and Twitter over 12,000 times; the LMFAO tweet itself got over 1,000 retweets. The audio files I posted on the YouTube page have been downloaded over 6,000 times. The video got hundreds of comments, most of which are positive. And I’ve gotten dozens (if not hundreds) of mentions on Twitter, Facebook, and App.net from friends and strangers who love it.

And the most astonishing thing to me? The mashup itself is catchy, but it’s far from being technically great. There are issues with some parts of the song not mashing well, clashes between keys, mismatched song syncing and beatmatching, issues with the video clips not being perfectly aligned, etc. It’s my first time making a mashup, and it was meant to be a learning experience, not a viral hit with flawless execution. I’ve heard my own song dozens of times, both during and after the process of making it. When you hear your own work that much, and you know exactly how it is pieced together, the faults are not only obvious, they get in your face no matter how much you try to shut them out. But it’s too late to do anything about that now. The Internet has taken the song and given it legs to run. It’s out of my hands, technical merits be damned.

I’m very fortunate to have an audience of thousands of people on social networks to seed ideas to. Many of them fall right on their face. I expected this to, as well. But then that group took it and started a chain reaction which brought this little weekend project to hundreds of thousands. I am deeply grateful for and humbled by the friends and strangers who gave me a week of consistently beaten expectations and holy-crap-I-can’t-believe-this-is-real moments. But most of all, I am more encouraged than ever to push forward and keep this little dream of making electronic music alive. I have a renewed sense of confidence and courage to improve, to try again, to turn a what-if into a reality.

So thank you to those who have offered their support, praise, critique, tweets, shares, likes, upvotes and downvotes. Thank you to everyone who overlooked the technical flaws and offered their appreciation. Thank you to LMFAO, Dev, The Offspring, The Bloodhound Gang, and of course PSY, for being the unwitting participants in a learning experiment, for putting something into the world that I could draw from. Thank you to the bloggers, the writers, the curators, and the DJs who gave me the elation of feeling for just a moment like a rock star. I won’t ever forget it.

Try something that scares the hell out of you. It just might turn into something wonderful.

Server teams are made up of the people who write and maintain the code that makes servers go, as well as those who keep that code working. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Google, and every other service in the world have one or more people in this role. When things go right, nobody notices, and they get no praise. When things go wrong, their phones ring at 3 in the morning, they’re up fixing a new issue, and they’re answering calls from every cog in the corporate ladder who’s screaming about how much money they’re losing. It’s a thankless job.

Diablo 3’s launch has had a number of issues around load. When you have millions of people swarming on a server, ruthlessly trying to log in every few seconds, it causes a huge amount of load. At this scale, things you expect to go right suddenly break in strange and unfamiliar ways. No amount of load testing could adequately prepare the server team behind Diablo 3 for firepower of this magnitude. The way you fix these kind of issues is to look at what’s slow, fix it to make it less slow, and hope it works. Do this until load stops being a problem. Oh, and you have to do it quickly, because every second that goes by people are getting more and more upset. And you can’t break anything else while you do it.

The people who work on the servers for services of any decent scale cope with new problems every day around keeping the thing alive and healthy. The Diablo server team has been moving quickly, solving issues of massive scale in a short time, and getting the service running again. Players notice and yell the service when it stops working, but the response to it and the maintenance of it has been quick and effective.

Next time you’re using an Internet service, or playing a multiplayer game, think about the people who keep it running. If you know any of these people, tell them thanks. They’re the unsung heroes of the Internet.

Smartphones have replaced lots of types of small devices. iOS and Android have made it easy to build apps that perform all kinds of functions, replacing other standalone devices like media players and GPS. It’s been wondered if they would replace handheld gaming devices, and for many people they have. For awhile, I thought they had, at least for my needs. But after trying to play games on touchscreen-only devices for years, I’ve largely felt unenthused about the deeper and more engaging games that would come from big studios. These games required a higher level of precision control that touchscreens just couldn’t deliver.

The PS Vita caught my attention about a month before its launch in the US. It combines a lot of the best features of smartphones with the controls of console games. It has a gorgeous, large, high-resolution touchscreen (and a back panel that is touch-sensitive), as well as a tilt sensor and cameras for augmented reality games. But it also has almost all of the buttons of a typical PS3 controller, including two analog sticks. Sony managed to cram all of this functionality into a device that, while large, is not too big to fit into my pocket, and with long enough battery life for a busy day interspersed with some gaming. The combination of apps and games (which I will describe as just “apps” for the sake of this review) is powerful, and the hardware power and display size make it a compelling device.

2011 is coming to a close, so I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few apps and games on Mac and iPhone that have been invaluable to me. I broke this out into four categories, each with two apps. I have purposely omitted iPad, because frankly, I rarely use my iPad (and I prefer the TouchPad over the iPad), and don’t feel I’ve played with enough iPad apps to really give it a fair shake. So I’ve left that off to focus on iPhone and Mac apps and games. I hope you’ll check out all of these great apps.

Adobe is finally putting an end to Flash Player. They’ve announced they’re stopping development of the mobile Flash Player, which is where the future of tech innovation is heading, and the writing is on the wall for desktop Flash Player as well. This is a good thing for a myriad of reasons, both technical and political.

However, it is important to remember that Flash drove much of the innovation on the web as we know it today. When Flash was conceived over a decade ago, the web was a glimmer of what it is today. Creating something visually impressive and interactive was almost impossible. Flash brought the ability to do animation, sound, video, 3D graphics, and local storage in the browser when nothing else could.

Without Flash, MapQuest would not have been able to provide maps for years before Google did in JavaScript. The juggernaut YouTube would not have been possible until at least 2009, four years after its actual launch. Gaming on the web, which has been around as long as Flash, would only now be possible a decade later. Flash enabled developers to create rich user experiences in a market dominated by slow moving browser developers. Even in 2011 Flash exists to provide those more powerful apps to less tech-savvy people who still use old versions of Internet Explorer.

Flash Player itself seemed like a means to an end. Macromedia, and then Adobe who acquired them, sells the tool that you use to build Flash content. Thus, Adobe’s incentive was not to build a great Flash Player, but a pervasive one that would sell its tools. Its technical stagnation provided a market opportunity for browser developers to fill in the gaps that Flash provided. As a result it has a huge market dominance in tools for building rich apps for the web, tools HTML5 lacks.

This puts Adobe in a unique position. As HTML5 continues to negate the need for Flash Player, Adobe has the tools for implementing Flash within HTML5, and the market eager for those tools. Hopefully this move signals that Adobe will be moving in this direction. Because the web DOES need great HTML5 tools for people who aren’t savvy in JavaScript, especially for the people who used Flash to do it previously.

HTML5 offers developers the ability to build high-performance, low-power apps and experiences. Browser innovation has never been faster; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are all competing to bring the best new features to their browsers in compatible ways. But they’re just now filling in many features Flash Player has had for years. Adobe can harness this to help build a better web, and few others can. Hopefully they seize this moment.

It seems like every other week I’m reading a blog post from a person who went to a tech conference, or a meetup, or heard a talk, and was rightly offended that someone made a tactless joke about women, either about women in general or about specific women. It is disheartening to hear that any group would be made to feel less worthy of respect in our circle, especially at a time when our industry is undergoing one of the most massive and impactful revolutions in decades, and at a time when we need new blood the most. Every person in our industry should be fighting for inclusivity and should welcome new members with open arms and helpful tutorials. Why there aren’t more people pushing for this, I don’t know.

It is equally saddening to hear so many respectable people jump to conclusions about what your actual motives might be when trying to have an adult discussion about this sensitive subject. I’ll make no qualms about it; I’m a born-middle-class white guy, so right off the top, there will be people who will read this under the pretext that I’m either a misogynist or that I’m some kind of “Internet white knight”. As a middle-class white guy, my exposure to injustice and inequality has been limited. I cannot possibly know how it feels to hear words thrown around that minimize the role of women in tech. But I also have rarely been a presenter; who am I to say that I know what Noah Kagan’s motives were when he put “faceless bitch” on a slide at a recent conference? He could’ve been trying to lighten the mood, he could have a vendetta against women in tech. I don’t know.

I’m inclined to believe that incidents like this, such as where women are mocked by a presenter, are isolated events perpetuated by a non-representative group of a few people. When I go to conferences, I keep an active ear open for slurs against women, and have yet to hear any. But what’s fascinating to me is how women are the group continually called out. A demographic survey created by A List Apart shows that women made up 17.8% of respondents; the same study also showed that Asians, blacks, and Hispanics each represented no more than 6% of the group (which is itself a completely separate topic of inequality that seems to be forgotten in these discussions). Yet women are the demographic so frequently mocked and shamed. It probably boils down to sex and the fact that the people that connect to this industry tend to be more introverted, but I don’t know.

The only two things that unite everyone in this industry are that 1) we are all fascinated with high technology, and that 2) we are all humans. As humans we have cognitive biases which prejudice us towards recognizing things the way we’d like them to be. So when we hear that, over the course of several conferences, jokes were made that denigrate women, we’re biased to believe that these events are misogynistic in nature, and that repeated incidents show a trend of sexist men trying to keep out women. It’s possible that’s what’s happening; I think the truth is that these people generally are poor communicators and entertainers put into a role of communicating and entertaining, and failing. But I don’t know.

I don’t know the solutions to the problems we face, but I do know a few things that we all can do better, no matter what subset of demographics you belong to.

• Actively call out unacceptable remarks when they’re perpetuated at the expense of any group within our community. Whether that’s at the expense of women, men, Android fans, Windows fans, Apple fans, anyone. There is no logical reason for our fledgling industry to show animosity towards any group.

• Fight the groupthink mentality to label anyone who screws up . Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Few people are truly evil and rotten. I’m reminded of this YouTube video on race; watch, but replace “racist” with “sexist”. Address what they did, not who they are. Let’s address individual problems without calling into question someone’s motives, unless someone makes the same mistake over and over without remorse.

• Consider not just on how your message is delivered, but also on how it will be perceived. Your audience will contain not only women, but members of every race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Joking at the expense of other groups is juvenile and unbecoming, and will reflect negatively not only on the speaker but on the tech community as a whole.

• Mentor young people who are interested in high technology, and help them learn how to become successful and open-minded. This is something that we should be doing a better job of as an industry as a whole. A teenager who wants to become a software engineer will learn acceptance if they are accepted into a group dominated by grown-ups.

More non-middle-class-white-guy people in our industry will only benefit everyone, from developers to designers to companies to customers. We must be vigilant to keep prejudice out and embrace every single person who wants to contribute to this revolution. But we must be similarly careful not to vilify people for mistakes; hindsight is, after all, 20/20. Of course, maybe I’m wrong. I just don’t know.

Be excellent to each other.

Thanks to Faruk Ateş, who has spoken at length on this issue, for his feedback on this post.