i am dustin diaz

Autocomplete Fuzzy Matching

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Autocomplete widgets live in nearly every system that requires filtering items via input against large amounts of data. This includes address books, email contacts, restaurants, even social graphs. However, in most matching algorithms, Engineers don’t take into account that people don’t know how to spell AND/OR are lazy. Thus here is a really simple solution to work around this problem, and in my own opinion, vastly improve the user experience.

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JavaScript Cache Provider

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Every developer knows the importance of caching. From end to end you have caching on the backend (memcached, xcache, etc.) to prevent your databases being lit on fire, edge caching on content delivery networks (CDN’s) in hopes that your browser will cache assets it sees more than once. And of course client-side caching so you don’t repeat expensive operations (albeit algorithmically or high volume repitions). Here is a solution in JavaScript to help you out with the latter, with optional support for HTML5 Local Storage.

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JavaScript Animate

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

Sort of an old topic for these times, but I thought I’d share a small snippet I wrote about a year ago for the live updating Twitter widgets which required a tad bit of animation without the use of a library. Of course, anyone doing a large amount of animation will use library or, when available in a browser – CSS transitions.

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Asynchronous method queue chaining in JavaScript

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Chaining. It’s an extremely popular pattern these days in JavaScript. It’s easily achieved by continually returning a reference to the same object between linked methods. However one technique you don’t often see is queueing up a chain of methods, asynchronously, by which functions can be linked together independent of a callback. This discussion, of course, came from a late work night building the @anywhere JavaScript API with two other mad scientists, Russ D’Sa (@dsa) and Dan Webb (@danwrong).

Anyway, let’s have a look at some historical conventions and compare them to newer ones.

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Something changed

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

And not just this website. Things are different now like, for example, my friends, my interests, and to sound nerdy, the web. All different for the better.

I’ve been a bit under the blog radar this last year. @Erin and I have been busy with our separate jobs, also creating our joint photography effort with Flash Bullet having done a dozen shoots the last few months. I’ve remained stagnant with my own personal photography having not being able to fully recover from last years 365.

Work @Twitter has kept me busy. A small group of us (@dsa, @todd, & @danwrong) had been heads down for the last two months trying to release something that we think will effect billions of lives called @Anywhere. We think it’s great.

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Unofficial Twitter Widget Documentation

Friday, July 24th, 2009

So, the Twitter Search Widget has officially launched. And the installation is fairly self-explanatory (as a matter of fact, I don’t think we even explained it at all??). But nonetheless, if you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth doing that now. The new widgets are hot! Ok. On with this.

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