Richard D Jones – Medium

Richard D Jones

Richard D Jones

Becoming a software freelancer

(6 tips on going into business for yourself. Number 3 will … well, you get the idea)

8 min readFeb 6, 2019

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Becoming a software freelancer

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Richard D Jones
in
Level Up Coding

Always pass one argument to your JavaScript function

JavaScript has no real concept of keyword arguments, and at the same time is remarkably flexible about what you pass in to a function. As…

6 min readJan 16, 2019

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Always pass one argument to your JavaScript function

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Richard D Jones

Never ask users what they want

(aka a Software Engineer’s take on the Brexit vote) (aka how to do good requirements capture)

8 min readJan 3, 2019

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Never ask users what they want

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Richard D Jones
in
ITNEXT

You should be doing parameterised testing

Writing tests with good coverage and that work all dimensions of your code is time consuming, repetitive, tedious and subject to the law…

6 min readOct 23, 2018

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You should be doing parameterised testing

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Richard D Jones

I accidentally wrote a text processor

Do you ever write software by accident? It happens to me all the time. “Oh, I could just write a quick script to do X” / “hm, this would be…

10 min readSep 21, 2018

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I accidentally wrote a text processor

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Richard D Jones
in
ITNEXT

An Object-Oriented pattern for JavaScript

JavaScript is resolutely not a traditional Object Oriented language, no matter how much it may give that appearance. It belongs to a class…

9 min readSep 7, 2018

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An Object-Oriented pattern for JavaScript

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Richard D Jones
in
ITNEXT

You shouldn’t use truthy tests

I hate truthy tests, and I don’t think you should use them, and I oppose them whenever they appear in a Pull Request.

5 min readAug 29, 2018

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You shouldn’t use truthy tests

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Richard D Jones
in
ITNEXT

Wrapping and truncating chart labels in NVD3 horizontal bar charts

If your horizontal bar chart labels are too long for your left margin, by default in NVD3 the labels will simply overflow the space, and…

14 min readAug 21, 2018

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Wrapping and truncating chart labels in NVD3 horizontal bar charts

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Richard D Jones

The surprising subtleties of link checking

I recently needed to check the links in a dataset to find out if they were active or how they were failing. Flippantly, I thought that this…

6 min readAug 1, 2018

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The surprising subtleties of link checking

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Richard D Jones

How many ways can you write a DOI?

DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) provide stable and persistent identifiers for your resources, and are routinely assigned to journal…

5 min readJul 27, 2018

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How many ways can you write a DOI?

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Richard D Jones

Richard D Jones

All things data: capture, management, sharing, viz. All-round information systems person. Founder at Cottage Labs. https://cottagelabs.com

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