Posts about technical partnerships

Life on the cutting edge can be treacherous. At any moment, your web browser may dramatically update its user interface. Your e-reader might take your books away. Your favorite snack cake could disappear from store shelves. For many, the uncertainty of this lifestyle just isn’t worth it. Fortunately, when it comes to Node.js development, you […]

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Proactive Node.js Development with Travis CI

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• performance

One of my favorite things about programming in node is the package management system. In almost all instances, the practice of locally installing modules for each project has simplified my life as a developer. However, as a long time contributor to Grunt, I have become intimately familiar with one edge case where this practice breaks […]

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Building Command Line Tools in Node with Liftoff

• Tagged in:
• deployment,
• open source,
• tools and workflow

Software development is a lot like meeting a friend for dinner. I’m serious! Every now and then I find myself sitting at a restaurant bar at 6:58 waiting for my friend to show up for our 7 o’clock reservation. All of a sudden I get a text: “Running 5 minutes late. See you soon.” Well, […]

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Time Estimation, Software, and Dinner

• Tagged in:
• software development process

Many readers will recognize the following program, which is an adaptation of The Little Schemer’s Y combinator implementation; written and published by Douglas Crockford in 2003 to demonstrate the commonalities found between JavaScript and Scheme. If you’re unfamiliar with recursion, fixed point combinators or the “Y combinator”, take a look at the Wikipedia article and […]

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The Little JavaScripter, Revisited

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• web standards

Imagine you are working in your shell, you could be in any directory anywhere, but you want to go to ~/Projects/MyProject. You’re probably used to typing something like this: cd ~/Proj[tab]/MyPro[tab] Wouldn’t it be nice if you could end up in the exact folder you want with just: cd MyProject The CDPATH environment variable Much like the […]

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Shell Hacking – CDPATH

• Tagged in:
• tools and workflow

In the world of web design it’s more common to condemn or praise existing work than it is to talk about the actual process of creating something great. For example, over the years I’ve complained more and more about restaurant websites. I don’t just mean the ones that play background music, rely on Flash, use […]

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Nom: My Process For Designing a Restaurant Site

• Tagged in:
• design,
• software development process

HTML5 is ready for mobile Open Web games. Flash is absent or disappearing on mobile devices. Meanwhile, in the US and the UK, 20% of Internet users are mobile-only, and in some markets more than half of Internet users are mobile-only. It is widely held that the next two billion people coming online in the […]

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Building HTML5 Games with GSN Games

• Tagged in:
• client side,
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications

AMD (short for Asynchronous Module Definition) is a JavaScript API specification for structuring modular code. The web abounds with blog posts illustrating its use in front-end application development (and there’s plenty of healthy debate around its necessity, too). The topic of unit testing (despite being integral to the process of software development) does not receive […]

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Effective Unit Testing with AMD

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• testing

For a recent consulting project I was attempting to render some fairly complex skeletal animations in WebGL on Firefox and Chrome. I quickly ran into a situation where the animation was rendering on Linux and Mac computers, but not on Windows. All the test machines had up-to-date graphics drivers, but the Windows machines threw a […]

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Counting Uniforms in WebGL

• Tagged in:
• data visualization,
• design,
• performance

Here at Bocoup I’ve been building a lot of multiplayer HTML5 games using Node.js and Socket.io. This stack has been working great for us! We’ve used Socket.io in our work with Game Show Network, PBS and MIT, and we build all kinds of stuff on Node. My experience on these projects has led me to […]

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Building Multiplayer HTML5 Games with Cloak

• Tagged in:
• performance,
• tools and workflow,
• web applications