Many developers and development shops have embraced testing in their server side code - either using a TDD model, or sometimes just with unit or functional tests created on the fly - but very few developers I talk to test their front end code beyond eyeballing it in a few browsers (or if they're lucky, with a service like BrowserStack). And even fewer of those use any kind of automation. In this post I'm going to try and help out that majority of you who aren't testing - or...
Web developers, I mean this with the utmost seriousness, we have a weight problem.
No, no... not YOU personally (well, maybe... we sit on our butts quite a bit) - I'm talking about our web sites. They're getting heavier, a LOT heavier. Year over year the top 1,000 web sites (according to Alexa ranking) have increased their page-weight about 24% * . This is according to the HTTP Archive statistics site which keeps such statistics for top 1000 and 100 web sites globally. And...
Recently I spent a couple of weeks trying out a new (to me) mobile web application framework: Sencha Touch (version 2.1.0). I was building a little event discovery tool mostly for the purposes of trying out the framework (although I also submitted the project to Sencha's "HTML5 is Ready" contest). In this post I'll outline some of the features of the framework, how to get up and running quickly, and some pitfalls to watch out for. This isn't intended to be a "...
Recently I watched a small interlude between TED talks from 2005 by Terry Moore. You may have seen, you may not. It's about how most of us have been taught an inferior way to tie our shoe laces. Take a look at the video below (it's only 3 minutes long):
I was hesitant to believe that our "weak form" knot was in fact so inferior, well, a few days ago I put it to the test. I went for a run and started with my shoe laces tied in my normal – weak – fashion. No...
Whether you are a new developer or an experienced guru, we all need to stay up to date on our industry and it's advances. This seems to be more true every year, and with that in mind, here are some great presentations from 2012 to stir your interest (but you can find a lot more!):
Web Components and the Future of Web DevelopmentEric Bidelman
Eric provides some fantastic information on a variety of topics related to web components coming up soon...