David Braun

A blog on which I write technical and non-technical articles on my view of modern software development.

I ported Go's channel feature for concurrent computation to JavaScript. Channels are arguably the most interesting construct for representing concurrency today and are partly responsible for Go's popularity in creating complex distributed applications. Now, this powerful tool can be used to create large scale distributed applications in Node.js as well as to simplify complex event-driven applications in the browser.

I created this library to solve the technical challenge of synchronizing multiple web clients with precision measured in milliseconds. It works by creating a JavaScript object in the browser called ServerDate, with the same API as JavaScript's native Date object, that the application developer can use to know the current time on the server. It uses Ajax calls periodically to keep the object synchronized with the server's clock.

I created a deterministic version of the JavaScript language. It's a compiler that takes a program written in ordinary JavaScript (ECMAScript®) and rewrites it so that it always produces the same outputs for given inputs.

It’s useful for writing distributed applications in which the same code executes simultaneously on multiple computers. If the code is deterministic, then its state can be synchronized across different computers without requiring network communication. Two examples which make use of this property are smart contract applications and multiplayer games.

JavaScript-fuzz generates random values for every standard, built-in type of ECMAScript 5.1, allowing users to fuzz test their code.

A (now outdated) method described for encrypting a hard disk, either in whole or in part, with the encryption key stored on an external medium for increased security. This was published by The Linux Documentation Project.