Welcome to Dispatches from Class, a blog series where I attempt to connect the theory I'm learning in my computer science classes with web development.

As software engineers, we try to squeeze out as much performance and efficiency from our code as possible. I've been learning how processors actually execute machine code, and have learned some surprising lessons that were not apparent from reading normal source code. Here I'll detail two ways you can speed up code snippets you probably use every day.

Recently, Alex McPherson and I spoke at jQuery Toronto. The conference was well organized and full of excellent content. This is a quick wrap-up of our experiences in the great white north and how I learned to make my slide deck perform better!

Quick Left likes JavaScript, that's no secret. What has been a secret until this very blog post is that we're international evangelists, and as such are sending Sam and Alex to speak at jQueryTO on March 2nd and 3rd.

This time around we're sharing some knowledge about our larger JavaScript applications and what we've learned from them.

Carrierwave makes it easy to attach files to Rails models, but all the uploading magic operates synchronously. If you're using Backbone and want to keep model updates asynchronous, it may seem like you're out of luck.

You're not. The new XMLHttpRequest spec, which you may know better as AJAX, supports an interface called FormData. This uses the same format as a synchronous form submitted with its type set to multipart/form-data, which is what enables file uploads in a regular, synchronous form. Make sure your target browsers support FormData.

Say you have a User model with a Carrierwave field called :avatar. The update action of your RESTful controller might look like this:

Backbone is not a very opinionated framework. It's super useful and we love it, but it definitely gives you enough rope to hang yourself (and then-some).

We at Quick Left have done battle against the likes of spaghetti DOM code and phantom views, and lived to tell the tale. Here's a new nugget from our adventures: Idempotent View Rendering

Images from gif.ly are now capable of being embedded as playable GIFs with just a script tag.

This year has been fantastic! We wish all our clients, friends, and family a Happy Holiday and a Fantastic New Year!

On Saturday, Sept. 8th, our Backbone.js training is kicking off in San Francisco. Our friends over at Singly have graciously agreed to host us, so we'll be setting up shop right in the Mission district of SF.

In this hands-on training session, we’ll cover the basics of how to best utilize Backbone, from getting up and running to organizing large JavaScript applications. Attendees will learn how (and when) to leverage Backbone within their projects and best practices for building applications. Get all the details and register.

In this article, we'll show you how to create a basic Node.js application using the Express framework and deploy it to both Heroku and Nodejitsu.

Little nips and tucks can improve both the performance and the ability to manage a large front-end project. Here are some that I found helpful while working on a recent Backbone app.

Note: If you'd like to learn more tips like these, sign up for one of our Backbone.js training sessions.