Memoizer

I sent my first pull request on Github, this week.

“Welcome to two years ago,” you say.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t really understand the concept behind Github. A lot has changed in two years–I love my job.

I read Addy Osmani’s article on the memoizer and I clicked a link. “Cool!” He wrote it up in Github. Wait, this code is different than the article. Someone made improvements?!

That got me thinking. I noticed a couple of things I could make better, so I forked the master and committed my changes. Knowing that IE7 has no native JSON support, I made the function fallback to just a no-op function. Second, I realized that there was no need to slice the arguments, you can stringify arguments and still get a unique cache key–a major performance boost. Then I made a pull request to suggest that the changes get added back to the master.

To my surprise, and delight, Jamie Mason merged my ideas. All-in-all, it was a rewarding experience and I can see myself doing it again. Social coding… who knew? I also see the value of writing code in Github then blogging it so the code conversation can continue after the article–much easier to manage than comments in a blog.