Excessive Enhancement at Full Frontal
In a few days I will be speaking at Full Frontal in Brighton. This conference, now in its third year, has done a great job of capturing so much of what is important and exciting to many front-end web developers.
Blog posts tagged development:
Profiting from a happy hack day
A few weeks ago at The Team, inspired by the Atlassian model of FedEx days which we have have successfully employed before, we managed to make some time for the development team to spend the day away from the office to work on something for themselves. No clients and no managers, just our own requirements and some time to work in new ways together. It yielded some valuable results.
Value in a happy hack day
A few weeks ago at The Team, inspired by the Atlassian model of FedEx days which we have have successfully employed before, we managed to make some time for the development team to spend the day away from the office to work on something for themselves. No clients and no managers, just our own requirements and some time to work in new ways together. It yielded some valuable results.
Expectations of web development at agencies
Recently I was involved in an very short bit of consultancy for an e-commerce company. We were focussing on the performance of their site in the browser, and they were more than a little surprised at the software engineering rigour that we exhibited given that we are just an agency. Perhaps we’re thought of us web development production lines who churn out web sites. That’s not my view.
In defense of IE6
No really! Read that title again. I’m about to argue against placing so much blame for painful Web development at the door of Internet Explorer 6. I’m not going try and claim that IE6 isn’t a huge pain in the arse of all good Web developers. Let’s face it, Web developers love to bitch about it, but I do think that it’s time for some accountability.
Flash v Web. Behind Enemy Lines
OK, I’m being over dramatic, but sometimes it does feel like I’m on a bit of a stealth mission. Pity that I forgot to bring any stealth! I’ve been working here at The Team for 3 months now and am enjoying myself greatly, but there is an issue that challenges me on a daily basis. That is that we do a lot of Flash work here, and yet I’m a big advocate of using Open Web Technologies.
Mashing up flickr in the client with jQuery
Recently I saw Tim Stevens post on Twitter about a slide show he had built using his Liveloom application. His slide show grabs some photos from Flickr tagged with ‘Osmosoft’ and then renders them with all manner of visual effects using Flex. While the visual effects available via Tim’s app are impressive, I’m a big advocate of open web standards and enjoy making things from HTML and Javascript, rather than using tools like Flex.
Unobtrusify your Javascript
Recently Jon Lister, a colleague of mine at Osmosoft showed me a website made by his friend Joshua Bradley. The site, used some of the Javscript code from TiddlyWiki‘s animation engine to create some nice visual effects. I loved the design, but could see some room for improvement in the implementation. I’m a big advocate of Unobtrusive Javascript and Progressive Enhancement and so I set about producing a quick demo of how a similar result could be achieved in the most Web-kind and accessible way available using jQuery for the behaviors.
JSSpec bundle for Textmate helps with writing tests
Recently, we at Osmosoft have been trying to make good on one of our pledges: To introduce a unit testing framework to Tiddlywiki development.