Happy 5th Birthday
¶ by Rob Friesel
Happy fifth birthday to you, Holden. I can’t imagine the world without you, nor would I want to.
Linkdump for June 20th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
At The Verge — a great collection of LHC images. For some reason, I get a kick out of the "MAGNET STATUS" sticker every time I look at it.
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David Simon, on the NSA/PRISM scandal.
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Maciej ("the Pinboard guy") on David Simon's "We are shocked, shocked…" piece.
Secrecy erodes the rule of law because it makes democratic accountability impossible.
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David Simon, responding to Maciej (responding to David Simon):
And if I sound exasperated with other liberal voices on this issue it’s because their barricades are in the wrong place, facing the wrong way, defending the wrong moral and legal terrain. Thus far, the sum of of liberal argument against the NSA program amounts to a veritable Maginot Line of legal ignorance, borrowed libertarian selfishness and jaw-dropping obliviousness to the notion that those who fear a civil liberties apocalypse and wish to fight against such are decades late to the fields where battles actually rage.
You might be able to get away with David Simon's first, but definitely read Maciej's post and this.
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A curated collection of CSS, Sass, LESS and Stylus libraries.
“Fun JS” (and BurlingtonJS #3)
¶ by Rob Friesel
Last night was the third BurlingtonJS meet-up, and it seems to have been another success. Attendance was good and the crowd was once again pretty engaged. Always fun, always a room full of smart people, always good discussion. This month, I had the privilege of presenting, and took a few pages from chapters Michael Fogus’s (@fogus) new book, Functional JavaScript. 1 I’ve included the slides for my talk here: Continue reading →
- Which, I might add, Functional JavaScript is (as I type these words) the #1 seller for Amazon’s computer books category.[↩]
Linkdump for June 18th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
“Time to First Photo” on the Photostream page
Ross Harmes on how the Flickr team achieved a 7× speed increase in page render times:The first time you come to any Flickr page, we store the width of your browser window in a cookie. We can then read that cookie on the server on subsequent page loads.
Gotta love a simple solution.
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Thank you, Alex.
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Wherein Nicolas Bevacqua discusses the native APIs that underlie your favorite jQuery functions. It's worth reading — mostly as an exercise in peeling back the onion layers to remember just how much is going on behind the scenes of some of these functions. However, he's simplifying a bit in a few cases (e.g., with the XHR) so be aware of that.
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Alex Sexton, writing at Smashing Magazine:
A front-end operations engineer would own external performance. […] They own everything past the functionality. They are the bridge between an application’s intent and an application’s reality.
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James Sommers, writing for Aeon:
The price of a word is being bid to zero. That one magazine story I’ve been working on has been in production for a year and a half now, it’s been a huge part of my life, it’s soaked up so many after-hours, I’ve done complete rewrites for editors — I’ve done, and will continue to do, just about anything they say — and all for free. There’s no venture capital out there for this; there are no recruiters pursuing me; in writer-town I’m an absolute nothing, the average response time on the emails I send is, like, three and a half weeks. I could put the whole of my energy and talent into an article, everything I think and am, and still it could be worth zero dollars.
This resonates with me in so many painfully obvious ways.
Linkdump for June 13th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
Fairly thorough intro to functional testing with CasperJS, posted on the New Relic blog. (And/but: why someone would use XPath over CSS selectors is puzzling to me…)
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Testing made easier in Internet Explorer
Such a great resource.
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Ferris Jabr, writing for Scientific American.
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Alex Micek at tumbledry.org. This is two years old now, but I'd never seen it before last week or so. It's arguably a better infinite scroll implementation than … any of them. In the comments, "DrPizza" has a decent criticism of parts of it (inserting pages into the history just from scrolling violates the principle of least surprise), and infinite scrolling as a paradigm is just plain broken anyway, and/but this solves the annoying state problem.
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Gretchen Reynolds, NYTimes.com:
Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done.
I think I'd be OK with an unpleasant 7-minute workout.
search term haiku: May 2013
¶ by Rob FrieselWebStorm and Compass
drama of an octopus
Andale Mono fat
“Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the site. Where possible, I attempt to keep the search phrases intact. However, as these are haiku poems, I do need to follow the rules.
Linkdump for May 29th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
By Chris Coyier, writing at CSS-Tricks. I largely agree with this list, but I'm not sure I get the assertion that you should put
@includes after "regular" styles. If you're ordering the CSS properties according to some specific scheme (e.g., Zen Ordering) then wouldn't you want the output of your mixins to be in the right place? Other than that: some good rules to follow. -
Rob Fletcher, writing at Ad-Hockery re: how to ape Spock's
whereblocks in Jasmine tests. It's a pretty clever technique, and it looks like he arrived at roughly the same place as Neckbeard.js. (Not that I'd heard of Neckbeard.js before either… so that was a bonus.) -
Worth it, even if they'd left out the rubric. (Which they didn’t.)
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Rossen Stoyanchev, writing at the SpringSource Team Blog. In some ways, a pretty typical feature announcement. But what was most interesting to me was the first-class support for SockJS.
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John W. Long, writing at The Sass Way. Tl;dr: read up on Snook's SMACSS, and consider a similar approach in your Sass to help you avoid "the Inception problem".
Linkdump for May 23rd
¶ by Rob Friesel-
David Storey, on the Smashing Coding blog, and taken from Redesign The Web (The Smashing Book #3).
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Interesting. Terribly interesting…
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Awesome tip and somewhat obscure feature of the CSS content property, detailed by David Walsh. Surprisingly widely supported, as well! Here’s a jsFiddle I put together to help illustrate Walsh’s point: jsfiddle.net/founddrama/PDkAp
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Anna Codrea†‘Rado writing at Quartz. It's short and a little bit reductionist, but the points largely stand (and she's citing a few studies/source to go along with it). For a more nuanced discussion, see what Susan Cain has to say about open-plan offices in Quiet. (Frankly, I'm kind of surprised that Codrea-Rado didn't bring up how this affects introverts…)
Linkdump for May 21st
¶ by Rob Friesel-
Flickr Redesign Round-up! The official announcement over at the Flickr Blog. I know that there are a lot of people hating on the new redesign, but I think I "get" the vision behind it. I think they're making a calculated gamble with such a dramatic re-thinking of their interface (to say nothing of the pricing plan) but overall I think it's a pretty smart investment. It will come at the cost of alienating some long-time users, but it's necessary for reinvigoration and growth.
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Flickr Redesign Round-up! Mashable breaks down what Flickr's new (somewhat bizarre) pricing structure means for long-time Flickr Pro users like myself. The tl;dr good news: "Sit tight; everything will be fine." And/but: I think we can all agree that there are a bunch of weird quirks and gotchas in the new plan. ($500/year for 2 TB? When 1TB is $50/year or else free-with-ads.)
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Flickr Redesign Round-up! At Co.Design: business + innovation + design. Mostly just a bunch of screenshots, but it helps to convey the changes in a visual digest format. (Spoiler alert: kind of has more than 3 features featured.)
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Flickr Redesign Round-up! Filed under: "Well that didn't take long…" It's a Node CLI for turning your for-free 1TB of Flickr storage in to… free storage. (Albeit inefficient/wasteful storage…) PNG hacks FTW?
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At SitePoint. IE8 drops below 10% and versions of IE overall account for less than 30%; Chrome climbs up near 40%.
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In the run-up to the Functional JavaScript release (pre-order your copy!), you should read this great post by Darren Newton (@d_run) on using Underscore-Contrib for functional style JS.
Linkdump for May 20th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
Paul Lewis writing for HTML5 Rocks, Avoiding Unnecessary Paints:
What happens if I scroll and I happen to move the mouse at the same time? It's perfectly possible for me to inadvertently "interact" with an element as I scroll past it, triggering an expensive paint. That, in turn, could push me through my frame budget of ~16.7ms (the time we need to stay under that to hit 60 frames per second). I've created a demo to show you exactly what I mean. Hopefully as you scroll and move your mouse you'll see the hover effects kicking in, but let's see what Chrome's DevTools makes of it…
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Dr. Axel Rauschmayer on Google's Polymer:
Nobody actually wants to use frameworks. We only want to build web user interfaces efficiently and frameworks help.
I largely agree with his points, especially the thrust of the above pull-quote. When discussing frameworks and libraries like this, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that they're around because of some gaping hole in the language's native/standard libraries. Google's recent efforts (e.g., AngularJS and now Polymer) point to more declarative or component-oriented approaches; put in the context of HTML5 and the advancements there, that makes a lot of sense. I'm interested in Polymer, but I feel like I need some more time to digest it. Like when Twitter open-sourced Flight, there's this sense of: "Cool! That's a novel approach…" Which also feels a bit like: "Whoa, that's really different." Now to dig in…
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Pamela Fox gives an overview of some of the server- vs. client-side UI decisions (putting it in context at Coursera). She gets in to some of the trade-offs and makes cases for each one having its place.
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Senthil Padmanabhan and Steven Luan, writing for the eBay Tech Blog.
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Paul Miller, writing for The Verge:
He [Nathan Jurgenson] pointed out that there's a lot of "reality" in the virtual, and a lot of "virtual" in our reality. When we use a phone or a computer we're still flesh-and-blood humans, occupying time and space. When we're frolicking through a field somewhere, our gadgets stowed far away, the internet still impacts our thinking: "Will I tweet about this when I get back?"