This was my third time attending the Full Frontal conference, so I thought that this year I should actually take time to write a little blog post about it. I took a week off from work to be fully able to enjoy visiting Brighton and seeing friends. Experience has shown me that in the week around Full Frontal, the city is full of geeks and there is much socialising to do. This year was no exception. ...
While you’re working on your own computer and accessing webapps running on that computer, response times are going to be fast. Most of the day, this is what we want. Working on your local machine, your webapp should be as fast as you can possibly make it. But, for some situations, we need to examine how our application behaves when network connections are suboptimal. On unix based systems there are a multitude of ways to slow down connection speeds of the entire system. Asking on Twitter, I learned that Apple recently released Network Link Conditioner for OSX Lion. ...
A while a ago I was approached by @dalager, who asked if I would be interested in giving my introductory talk about “Closures, this, call and apply” to a local audience at Community Day. I am pretty much always excited about the opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas with my tribe. So, after figuring out that I would in fact be in the area at the time of the conference, I jumped at the opportunity. With the current schedule, I’ll be speaking in the afternoon… immediately after lunch. ...
On Saturday 2011-07-09 I attended Code Retreat Berlin, these are my notes. For those that have not been to or heard of code retreats, let me just quickly sketch out the concept. A code retreat is a place where programmers can practice their craft and improve their collaborative skills. Just like musicians need to practice, so do programmers. The day is divided up into six sessions of 45 minutes with a little retrospective break in between, and of course a lunch break. During the sessions you pair up with another programmer, and do pair programming, working on Conway’s Game of Life. Not surprisingly, the sessions were over much too quickly, just as the going was getting good. ...
“Considered harmful” has always been good link bait. I am not trying to start a flamewar, but merely express my concerns over the recent decisions of the jQuery team to actively endorse plugins that deserves no special treatment from any other plugins out there. If you have different opinions, please do respond in the comments or write a blog post expressing them. Extending globals with interesting side effects When Prototype was first released, everyone was really excited and could suddenly do a lot more with JavaScript across browsers, that would have been considered almost a black art before (to some it still is). ...
For quite a while, I have been working on a large web application for a client. For publish/subscribe style messaging in the web frontend, we use jQuery custom events triggered on the body element. This is quite a neat trick to ensure loose coupling of modules, since you’re really just tracking what the user does, and not what module happened to generate the message. This approach has been introduced to my team by me, and I have been very eager to help my team mates understand how to use it. ...
Tomorrow I will be attending dConstruct 2010, which I am very excited about. I flew in a day early, so I could get some time to enjoy Brighton. One of the first stops has been The Skiff, “a nice little place to work in the middle of Brighton”. The Skiff is indeed a very nice place: very few interruptions and very friendly people. While sitting at my visitors desk, I’ve managed to finally finish a little JavaScript library, that has been a very long time in the making: FailFast. All it took was tidying up the documentation and writing the last few missing unit tests. ...
Earlier today Christian Johansen pushed the button and published Juicer v1.0.0 as a gem. For those unfamiliar with Juicer, it’s an open source Ruby based tool that allows you to merge and minify your JavaScript and CSS files. Internally, Juicer uses JSLint to keep your JavaScript in good shape and supports both YUI Compressor and Google Closure Compiler to make your CSS and JavaScript files as small as possible. I have written about speeding up your Webby site with Juicer previously, and with the new version there are even more features to like. These are the new features that exites me the most ...
Every once in awhile you come across one of those Internet Explorer 6 issues that tries it’s hardest to be really annoying. Today was one of those days with IE. Having flown out to work directly with a client’s web team yesterday, I spent some time today cursing at IE6 and trying to deal with a weird flickering of the webpage, apparently caused by hovering over a menu. After about 40 minutes, I had the palm–meets–forehead “heureka” moment, and recognised that the bug I was seeing was in fact the infamous IE6 background flicker bug, which I’ve exterminated on other sites before. ...
For some time now, I’ve been using Comatose CMS for client sites. It is quite possible the smallest Rails based CMS, having only the features you need for most sites and flexible enough to allow you to extend it if you need to. Whenever you’re doing content publishing, you should make it as easy as possible for search engines to find and catalog our content. In this post I will show you how you can create a simple Sitemap from a Comatose CMS. ...