The Telegram messaging app has an extensive Bot API that is available to the public. I published a Node.js client library to npm. The library explicitly lacks a hook for setting up long polling as it is actually quite easy to build a simple express app that handles incoming messages for you.

Software development seems to be all about best practices today. For every task that needs to be done, there seems to be the one single way to do it. Depending on who you ask that is of course.

I sometimes wonder if all those best practices are actually all that benefitial. It might be that there is a point where they actually hurt us.

Backbone is a piece of software I love very much. Compared to other behemoth like frameworks I admire the fact that it encourages me to do things right while thinking about them myself. And if I need answers I can just read its source code and get the answers that I need. It basically taught me development that goes further than $('#logo').magicPluginDust().

In 2014, I wrote an introduction to the Asynchronous Module Definiton for the fantastic Learn X in Y minutes. And although I abandoned require.js by now and have become a die-hard browserify fanboi (just like I used to be a require.js fanboi…) I still think modular JavaScript is an idea that should be propagated, even in 2016, so here you go with the original introduction.