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  • Co-op Series Part II: Getting Started

    Sheila Moussavi - September 26th, 2023

    We kicked off this series by announcing our decision to pursue a worker-owned cooperative model. In this and subsequent posts, we will be providing updates and learnings as we progress. Last fall, after nearly two years of research and discussion, we made our first major step toward cooperatizing: Bocoup is now a member of The […]

  • Co-op Series Part I: Our decision to pursue worker-ownership

    Sheila Moussavi - September 22nd, 2022

    Bocoup is incorporated in the United States – a country with no worker safety net. The damning scarcity of federally protected labor rights means that employers are often the ones determining whether workers get quality health care, a fair wage, or time off after having a child. Companies in most states are protected by anti-worker […]

  • What if Technology was Created for the Benefit of All Life on Earth?

    Lazarus Letcher - April 22nd, 2022

    Earth Day 2022 My generation was raised in the bosom of corporate greenwashing. Every year on Earth Day I remember gathering with my classmates to learn about our role in protecting the environment. We were constantly reminded of the dire need for us to separate our recyclables (and to shame our parents in to doing […]

  • Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! Resources for Getting Started with Digital Accessibility

    Courtney Holland - May 20th, 2021

    Each year, on the third Thursday of May, millions across the globe come together to acknowledge and celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an initiative started by Joe Devon and Jennison Asuncion. Devon and Asuncion created the day with the intention for people to gather and “learn about and experience digital accessibility.” Back in November […]

  • Charting Web Platform Interoperability in 2018

    Seth Thompson - December 20th, 2018

    Bocoup has been a long-time contributor to the Web Platform Tests (WPT) project, helping spec writers draft testable specs and helping browser implementers test features for correctness and interoperability based on those specs. In 2018, we’ve made great strides improving the coverage of WPT, the ergonomics of writing and running tests, and the infrastructure necessary […]

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  • So, You’d Like to Start an Open Source Project

    Mike Pennisi - January 29th, 2018

    Regular readers of this blog are no strangers to free and open source software. From Firefox to Brave, Node.js to OpenSSL, and jQuery to React (finally), today’s web developer can’t get very far at all without relying on “FOSS.” However, there is a huge difference between consuming FOSS and maintaining FOSS. The latter task is […]

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  • Our Technical Partner Moseys On

    Mike Pennisi - December 11th, 2017

    Back in 2012, on a day that is now ensconced in company lore, the IRC user tkellen joined the channel for the Bocoup-maintained F/OSS project, Grunt. The stranger immediately began to vent on all the shortcomings he saw in the task runner. This was our introduction to Tyler Kellen. We’re reflecting on that event today […]

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  • Ergonomic Testing with Webpack, Part One, File Resolving

    Z Goddard - September 14th, 2017

    This is part one in a series on the intersection of module bundlers and testing frameworks. Our focus will be webpack and jest but the techniques explored here can be reused with other tools as well. Modern websites and applications are routinely built by combining hundreds of small JavaScript modules. In order to increase the […]

  • Death Bear Starts a New Life

    Mike Pennisi - July 28th, 2017

    Sue Lockwood recently left Bocoup to start a new job at Splice. There’s a lot we’re going to miss about working with her, but I think it all boils down to passion. Sue pours her energy into everything she does, and everyone at Bocoup benefited from that. It’s fair to say that we all know […]

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  • Getting Started with Shiny

    Jim Vallandingham - July 11th, 2017

    Do you know a bit of R and have some data you need to visualize quickly? In this blog post we take a look at Rstudio’s Shiny package and the first steps toward creating a working interactive to explore your data with it. What is Shiny? Shiny is a framework to develop web-based frontends for […]

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  • Exploring New Technologies for Making Maps (Part Two): Two Fragment Shaders and a Mouse

    Yannick Assogba - April 18th, 2017

    In part one of this series we started learning how to make maps rendered by WebGL, a browser based hardware-accelerated graphics API for 2D and 3D graphics. Our access to this technology was via Tangram, a map rendering library from Mapzen. This post will focus primarily on shaders, those perplexing parallel programs that power our […]

  • Getting Started with VoiceOver & Accessibility

    Sue Lockwood - February 23rd, 2017

    If you are a web developer working on a Mac, you can become a hero for thousands of people out there by assuring that anything you create for the web can be read properly by a screen reader. This blog post is going to teach you how to access and wield this super power that […]

  • Exploring New Technologies for Making Maps. Vector Tiles & WebGL (Part One)

    Yannick Assogba - February 10th, 2017

    Maps are both practical and political. They possess undoubtable utility for navigating the physical world and have a long history of being used to shape and reshape the our social and political conceptions of the world. The ability to mark a territory, carve up a continent (or remember one), count a people, or map our […]

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  • Showing Missing Data in Line Charts

    Peter Beshai - September 20th, 2016

    While working on visualizing the results of internet speed test data for Measurement Lab, it became clear that there wouldn’t always be data for every geographic location on every single day. We might go several days without meeting a minimum threshold of tests, meaning there would be gaps in our data. This is a pretty […]

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  • How BoxArt Provides Fast DOM Animations

    Lyza Gardner and Z Goddard - September 13th, 2016

    Our last article about BoxArt showed how to use BoxArt’s Animated component to animate a tile-dropping game built in React. This time, we are going to look at some features of how Animated optimizes animations for performance. The Beastliness of Layout Thrash There’s a performance nightmare constantly threatening when you’re animating in the browser. As […]

  • Animating React Elements with BoxArt

    Lyza Gardner and Z Goddard - September 8th, 2016

    Have you ever tried writing animations into a website? It’s complicated. There’s lots of room for error, and no tool seems to fill every animation need. Recently, while writing some DOM-based games, the Bocoup team realized there wasn’t existing software for all of the projects’ animation needs. To help fill the gaps, Bocoup created BoxArt, […]

  • Accessibility Wins: Start with the foundations

    Susan Robertson - August 30th, 2016

    Welcome to the first post in our Accessibility Wins series, which will detail techniques you can use today to improve the accessibility of your web projects. Through this process, you’ll gain insight into how we think about accessibility here at Bocoup. First up is the foundation on which it all rests: writing good HTML and […]

  • Introducing BoxArt: A Library to Help Build HTML Games

    Z Goddard - May 23rd, 2016

    We’ve been busy building some Open Web Games at Bocoup. As we did so, we realized there was a dearth of resources for making performant, fun web games using the DOM. Most material aimed at game developers focuses on canvas rendering, and there aren’t many resources for web developers that show them how to use […]

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  • Mapping the Conflict in Syria – a Design Process (Part 1 of 2)

    Irene Ros - September 28th, 2015

    We’ve been very lucky this last month to join the excellent journalists and editors at GlobalPost on their journey to document the conflict in the Middle East. Several months ago, GlobalPost reached out to us for help with several new long narratives they had in the works. The first narrative, which focuses on the state […]

  • Vintage Visualization Restoration – Bump Chart Edition

    Jim Vallandingham - April 29th, 2015

    As a side project, I decided to reimplement a classic bump chart visualization using JavaScript and D3. Check it out here. My Introduction to the Bump Chart This bizarre but majestic visualization was originally created for the 1890 US Statistical Atlas by the wonderfully talented Henry Gannett. It provides a look at the most populated […]

  • d3.chart v0.2: Iterating on Reusability

    Mike Pennisi and Irene Ros - February 21st, 2014

    It’s been about eight months since we announced d3.chart, and today we’re excited to release a new version of the framework for creating reusable visualizations. We’ve strived to incorporate as many of the lessons we learned in the eight months since the initial release. For detailed explanations of these changes, see our migration guide and […]

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  • Towards “Responsiveness” with d3.chart.js

    Irene Ros - October 21st, 2013

    While data visualization is growing as a medium on the Open Web, practitioners of the field still struggle to make data visualization “work” on different screens. The question “how do I render at different sizes?” is an important one, but only tackles a portion of the greater challenge of “what does it mean to create […]

  • Introducing d3.chart

    Irene Ros - May 29th, 2013

    A Framework for Creating Reusable Charts with d3.js We’ve been working more and more with d3.js here at Bocoup with clients and as part of the Miso Project. As much as we love the library and are grateful that it exists, we’ve also run head-on into architectural issues with some of the patterns commonly used […]

  • Getting Started with Mozilla Gaia

    Dan Heberden - March 5th, 2013

    Mozilla recently announced FirefoxOS, an innovative project for mobile devices that uses Open Web standards to write UI and applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The team at Mozilla has done an incredible amount of work connecting a version of Gecko made specifically for the mobile operating system, to Gaia, the web technology-driven UI of […]

  • Tearing Grunt Apart

    Tyler Kellen - February 18th, 2013

    Introducing Grunt v0.4 For the last nine months, I’ve been working with Ben and our team of fantastic contributors to modularize the Grunt codebase. Today, we’re happy to announce that Grunt v0.4 has been published to npm. Hold on to your hats, a lot has changed! Architectural Improvements The primary focus of this version can […]

  • Third-Party JavaScript Development: The Future!

    Mike Pennisi - June 5th, 2012

    I’ve just returned from the future, and I have a lot to share with you. World news, sports scores, market changes, all that stuff can wait. First, we need to talk about third-party JavaScript. There’s a great deal of browser technology on the way that will affect the way you write code. Here, I’ll focus […]

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  • Third-Party JavaScript Development: CSS Defensive Techniques

    Mike Pennisi - April 17th, 2012

    (In a previous article, I introduced a convenient method for shipping stylesheets with your third-party JavaScript application.) When styling content in your third-party JavaScript application, you have a unique challenge to overcome: interference. The publisher may have used any number of techniques to define styles, and many of them threaten to modify the appearance of […]

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  • Third-Party JavaScript Development: Optimizing CSS Delivery

    Mike Pennisi - April 10th, 2012

    As a practicing masochist, I have recently developed an interest in third-party JavaScript application development. I’m not alone: third-party JavaScript (or “3PJS”) applications are becoming more and more common on the web (see Disqus, Optimizely, and Google Analytics, for instance). Like any developing methodology, best practices are constantly being explored and re-defined. In this article, […]

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  • Ringmark Gallery, Part 1

    Rick Waldron - March 6th, 2012

    See all in the Ringmark Gallery series Last week, Facebook and Bocoup announced a partnership and W3C Community Group initiative to raise the awareness of the development needs of The Mobile Web as a platform. This announcement included the unveiling of a “mobile acid test”, dubbed Ringmark. Ringmark runs real-time inference, functional and practical application […]

  • Startup Data Trends

    Irene Ros - January 18th, 2012

    We are excited to announce a new web application for exploring AngelList Data that we’ve been working on with our friends at Atlas Venture and AngelList: Startup Data Trends → We built this application with Backbone.js and the Backbone Boilerplate on top of the new AngelList REST data API. We used Jake and Capistrano for […]

  • Fieldrunners WebGL Particle System Demo

    Darius Kazemi - July 27th, 2011

    Bocoup is excited to be working with Gradient Studios to port the hit mobile game Fieldrunners, by Subatomic Studios, to HTML5. This is the second in a series of weekly development blog posts. Last time, I posted about some basic WebGL particle system benchmarks we ran. We were extremely pleased with the results. The next […]

  • Benchmarking WebGL Particle Effects

    Darius Kazemi - July 15th, 2011

    Bocoup is excited to announce that we are working with Gradient Studios to port the hit mobile game Fieldrunners, by Subatomic Studios, to HTML5. This is the first in a series of weekly development blog posts. One of the earliest tasks in porting an existing game to a new platform is to assess feasibility. This […]

  • 10K Event Apart Submission: Pictocalypse 10k

    Rick Waldron - August 24th, 2010

    Here we are, in the 11th Hour of submission for the 10K Event Apart contest. I just submitted my application, which weighs in at a grand total of 3991 Bytes… or it did, but after I submitted it I was still able to shave off a few more bytes, for a final total of 3676Bytes […]

  • Alternate x axis Intervals In g.raphaël.js linechart()

    Boaz Sender - June 21st, 2010

    Use the code below to try out everything that I talk about in this post, and check out the live demo over on code.bocoup.com. modified-x-axis-intervals-and-labels.js //based on the source of http://g.raphaeljs.com/linechart.html var options = { axis: “0 0 1 1”, // Where to put the labels (trbl) axisxstep: 16 // How many x interval labels […]

  • Javascript Web Workers: From Basics to jQuery.Hive, Part III

    Rick Waldron - May 18th, 2010

    I’m a jQuery enthusiast. Maybe even an evangelist. So I decided to make workers easy for my fellow jQuery developers – and thus was born the jQuery.Hive. Inititally it began it’s life as PollenJS a jQuery-looking library of functions that were light, useful and thread-safe. This was before the WebKit implementation existed so everything was […]

  • Javascript Web Workers: From Basics to jQuery.Hive, Part II (Browser Implementations)

    Rick Waldron - May 18th, 2010

    As I mentioned in Part I, the Web Worker API is available for use in Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+ and Chrome 4+, however the implementations are inconsistant. This has been completely overlooked by every single tutorial I’ve found. The issue revolves around the accepted argument to postMessage() (from both the main window and the worker). […]

  • Faster Javascript – Part 2

    Alistair Macdonald - March 10th, 2010

    In Faster Javascript Part 1 we compared a three methods for evaluating a string of alien DNA. With Switch, Boolean & Conditional going head to head, Switch was the clear winner with Conditional (Ternary) trailing way behind. Testing methods is one thing, but there’s more to writing fast code than just testing. For example: order […]

  • Restart Apache On Redhat

    Boaz Sender - January 5th, 2010

    The path to httpd on redhat 9 is /etc/init.d/httpd You can run the following commands on it: /etc/init.d/httpd configtest /etc/init.d/httpd graceful /etc/init.d/httpd restart /etc/init.d/httpd stop /etc/init.d/httpd start I always run configtest before restarting to make sure I haven’t messed anything up.

  • Announcing the Privacy Stack for Remix

    cypress masso - June 18th, 2024

    As part of our ongoing commitment to building a more just digital landscape, we have been thinking a lot about privacy this year. We’ve also been trying out Remix and though we wish the project was still working towards a renderer-agnostic architecture, we appreciate its reliance on web standards. Many technologists care about privacy and […]

  • How to run a DIY node server in 2024

    Boaz Sender - June 11th, 2024

    We have been deploying node apps to VPS and bare metal at Bocoup for almost 15 years, and with the growing number of full service hosting platforms, we thought this would be a good time to document how to do it yourself in 2024 for those of you who would still like to. We think […]

  • Full Stack Web Push API Guide

    Boaz Sender - June 5th, 2024

    Push notifications are supported across major browsers, and with their recent addition to iOS last year, they are a compelling integration for the web. We recently built an installable web application with push notifications called Robert’s App (read the iOS install instructions to test it out). We built the application with remix.run and implemented notifications […]

  • Remix.run at Bocoup

    Boaz Sender - May 29th, 2024

    Remix.run entered the mix of frameworks we’re using at Bocoup for a little over a year, and it’s been a huge lift in our velocity, enabling us to do things like offer free prototypes. We’re going to be posting a series of blog posts about parts of our workflow, and wanted to start with an […]

  • Bocoup’s Commitment to Privacy

    Lola Odelola - May 21st, 2024

    When the Web was created, it was an unregulated digital space where anyone with access could create, contribute and share. The lack of structure and governance on the early web quickly gave way to increased surveillance and unconsented data tracking. We are now in a time and space where governments, corporations and web users are […]

  • Free Prototype Program

    Sarah Z. Hakani - March 5th, 2024

    Bocoup is trying something new! We’re launching an opportunity to build a free prototype for you or your organization. We want to ensure that funding is not a barrier to entry to get new ideas out into the world, and we believe prototypes can open doors. Application Information Application link: https://freeprototype.bocoup.com Application deadline: Rolling until […]

  • Announcing updates to p5.js

    Lazarus Letcher - February 22nd, 2024

    A fresh upgrade to p5.js We’re excited to announce our work with p5.js to set the tech stack and rebuild their incredible website, supported by The Processing Foundation. The Processing Foundation is a rad organization that has helped folks in the visual arts improve their software literacy for over a decade. p5.js is an open-source […]

  • ARIA Automation Launch

    Lola Odelola - February 7th, 2024

    Automation is likely never going to go out of style. As a people, we’re constantly looking for ways to automate our lives and work in order to make the systems we rely on more efficient and reliable, and the ARIA-AT app is no different. We’ve added automation to the ARIA-AT App allowing test administrators to […]

  • Interop 2024 Launch

    Lola Odelola and Lazarus Letcher - February 1st, 2024

    Intro 2024 marks three years of working with our partners on bolstering interoperability on the web. This year, we’ve identified 17 focus areas dedicated to enhancing interoperability. Improving interoperability is not just about convenience; it’s a matter of accessibility and fairness, ensuring that simplifying web creation and navigation becomes a victory for all. The goal […]

  • Year in Review 2023

    Lazarus Letcher - January 30th, 2024

    Our 2023 Last year, we continued our efforts to help build a more just and accessible web and partnered with some incredible organizations and people to help with that goal. We had our ups and downs, but continued our journey to worker ownership and grew our team. We’re excited to see what 2024 has in […]

  • Interop 2024 Call For Proposals

    Lazarus Letcher - September 14th, 2023

    The Web Platform Test (WPT) Interop 2024 call for proposals is launching today! Read more about the Interop Project and join us in moving the web toward a more interoperable future. Interop 2023 2023 is our third year as part of the incredible Web Platform Test (WPT) Interop team, a unified effort by Apple, Bocoup, […]

  • Four-Day Work Week

    Lazarus Letcher - August 24th, 2023

    At Bocoup we shifted to a four-day work week at the start of 2023, and so far we’re loving it. We wanted to share the history of the labor movement that got us here, and how we’ve adjusted as a company to our new 32-hour weeks. The roots of the modern 40-hour work week can […]

  • ‘Can I Use…’, but for ARIA!

    Lola Odelola and Boaz Sender - April 17th, 2023

    Three years ago we announced our work on the ARIA-AT program to develop an interoperability testing system for assistive technologies, starting with screen readers. Last year we completed a redesign of the ARIA Practices Guide (APG), which web developers use for guidance on making accessible websites and apps. We’ve been hard at work along the […]

  • Making Zoom Calls More Accessible

    Lazarus Letcher - March 28th, 2023

    Our co-worker thought we were heartless monsters. This is a slight exaggeration, but an important lesson about what gets lost in translation when apps aren’t entirely accessible. During an experimental Zoom call, we learned that screen readers and the reactions feature aren’t quite compatible. That means that every time during a call when someone mentioned […]

  • Interop 2023

    Lazarus Letcher - February 1st, 2023

    After a successful launch in 2022 we’re extremely excited to continue the journey in 2023! Interoperability across browsers is not just frustrating for web developers, but also for users whose experience can vary wildly. Interop 2023 will continue the effort to increase interoperability, especially in high priority areas. Better interoperability is an issue of access […]

  • 2022 Year in Review

    Lazarus Letcher - January 13th, 2023

    Our 2022 This past year we continued to fine tune our commitment to accessibility, inclusion and justice on the web through our projects, processes, and team trainings. We grew our team substantially, partnered with some very rad folks, and committed to worker-ownership and a four day work week. Growing our Team We added three new […]

  • “I want to spend time living life, instead of working on living”: Life as an Accessibility Tester

    Louis Do - August 23rd, 2022

    Friday, August 24, 2012, marked the closing of a chapter. It also opened the door to a new life that I never thought was ever in my reach. Courtesy of The Hatlen Center’s independent living program I was able to establish a foundation that allowed me to create the life I am living today as […]

  • No Neutral Map

    Lazarus Letcher - June 28th, 2022

    So geographers, in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps And o’er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns This snippet from 18th century writer John Swift’s epic poem “Poetry: A Rhapsody” demonstrates that for centuries we have grappled with the politics of drawing borders, naming places, and mapping. There is no such […]

  • Redesigning ARIA Authoring Practices Guide

    Seth Thompson - May 19th, 2022

    We are excited to announce the launch of a redesign of the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG), an essential resource that shows web developers how to make accessible versions of common user interface design patterns, such as comboboxes, dialog modals, and menu bars. In coordination with the W3C APG Task Force and Education and Outreach […]

  • Bocoup and Interop 2022

    Simon Pieters - March 3rd, 2022

    In 2019, Bocoup, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Samsung, and W3C together conducted a survey for web developers called MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment. A key finding from that survey was that browsers behaving differently or not supporting the same features was among the top frustrations for web developers. The next year there was a follow-up Browser […]

  • Crossed Wires: Tech and the Movement for Black Lives

    Lazarus Letcher - February 23rd, 2022

    I remember sitting at my dorm room desk and reading the news that Trayvon Martin’s killer George Zimmerman was a free man. Trayvon was a couple of years younger than me, he still had the chubby cheeks of childhood. I didn’t really understand the term gutted before, but at that moment I felt hollow – […]

  • Bocoup 2021 In Review

    Sheila Moussavi - January 27th, 2022

    Our 2021 Over the past several years, we’ve been transitioning toward a more explicit focus on accessibility, inclusion, and justice on the web. Last year, we invested in growing our team, expanding our partnerships, and strengthening our operational foundation to support that transition. We’re excited to share some highlights with you as we prepare for […]

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  • Test262, Inside-out

    Mike Pennisi - March 4th, 2021

    Have you ever noticed how easy it can be to overlook small problems in everyday life? Some things start off as imperceptible but slowly intensify over time, and just like the apocryphal frog in boiling water, we acclimate. In pathological cases, we don’t recognize what’s happening until the issue has grown way out of hand. […]

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  • Improving Wireframe Accessibility: A more inclusive Design process

    Isaac Durazo - February 4th, 2021

    Whether you are well-versed in UX Design or new to the field, you have likely heard the term “wireframe.” A wireframe is a low-fidelity visual representation of a website, application, or product that allows us to define the structure of the page, hierarchy, and placement of elements, and ultimately helps us plan the layout and […]

  • Path Forward: Our Commitment to the Movement for Black Lives

    Sheila Moussavi - January 28th, 2021

    We’ve been quiet on here since last summer. We wanted to take some time to reflect on our engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement, and to advocate for it through various channels. As we prepare for the year ahead in the midst of white supremacist uprisings, we’d like to share our commitments to honoring […]

  • Introducing the Web Platform Contribution Guide

    Simon Pieters - May 26th, 2020

    Many people in the web development community, including many of us at Bocoup, were drawn to the web because it appears to be a diverse and inclusive technology platform. But, when we look around the room at who is working on web standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it is mostly a narrow group of […]

  • Interoperability Testing for Assistive Technologies and The Web Platform

    Seth Thompson - May 21st, 2020

    In 2018, we began contributing to ecosystem infrastructure for ARIA, the accessibility API for the web platform, with a project focused on regression testing for example patterns in the ARIA Practices Guide (APG). Since then, we’ve been working on writing new guidelines for the APG directly, which we continue to maintain with funding from Facebook […]

  • Bocoup & Open Standards: A (Very Full) Year in Review

    Jory Burson - December 19th, 2019

    We’ve had a very productive year making web standards more open, predictable, and inclusive. As our standards liaison, my job is to spot opportunities for us to do that work externally, and to see where more support is needed. We still have a lot to do, but it’s nice to reflect on our accomplishments over […]

  • Launching Test262 Results on MDN Web Docs

    Rick Waldron, Valerie Young, and Seth Thompson - October 22nd, 2019

    We are excited to announce support for report embedding on test262.report, along with a new MDN collaboration to bring up-to-date information about ECMAScript feature conformance to MDN Web Docs. Starting today, you can view test results from Test262 Report, updated daily and embedded directly on MDN pages for the newest ECMAScript features where interoperability and […]

  • The ECMAScribes

    Mike Pennisi - October 3rd, 2019

    Did you know that in the process of standardizing JavaScript, TC39 publishes notes for each of their regular meetings? Every other month, over 50 “delegates” convene to discuss the future of the language, and the minutes they publish provide an incredible view into their discussions. Here’s what you can expect to find: a list of […]

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  • Introducing a JavaScript library for exploring Scratch projects: sb-util

    Seth Thompson, Erika Miguel, and Corey Frang - September 26th, 2019

    Introduction We’re excited to introduce sb-util, a new JavaScript library that makes it easy to query Scratch projects via .sb3 files. This npm library allows developers (or even teachers and students) to parse and introspect Scratch projects for a range of purposes, from data visualization to custom tooling. Previously, working with Scratch project files required […]

  • How to scribe at TPAC

    Simon Pieters and Elika Etemad - September 13th, 2019

    Next week is TPAC in Fukuoka, Japan. This is an annual conference for all working groups in the W3C to meet face-to-face. Naturally, there is a desire to have a record of what is said in these meetings. This is done by people in the meeting taking turns to scribe. Even if you have attended […]

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  • Experiments in Faster Scratch 3 Loading with Texture Atlases

    Z Goddard - August 19th, 2019

    One of the best parts of the Scratch community is the diversity of Scratch projects. Community members have used the Scratch programming language to create many different kinds of interactive applications, from full game engines to music sequencers. One genre is especially unique: Multiple Animator Projects, or MAPs. These Scratch projects compile animations from many […]

  • Contributing to the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide

    Simon Pieters and Valerie Young - August 1st, 2019

    We believe that inclusivity and accessibility are of utmost importance to the open web platform. One of the ways that we empower the full diversity of Internet users is by ensuring that those with permanent disabilities and temporary limitations, can browse websites with assistive technologies. Writing accessible code improves the experience of browsing a website […]

  • Lessons Learned from a Year of Testing the Web Platform

    Mike Pennisi - July 22nd, 2019

    The web-platform-tests project is a massive suite of tests (over one million in total) which verify that software (mostly web browsers) correctly implement web technologies. It’s as important as it is ambitious: the health of the web depends on a plurality of interoperable implementations. Although Bocoup has been contributing to the web-platform-tests, or “WPT,” for […]

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  • Take the MDN Developer & Designer Needs Survey

    Jory Burson - July 16th, 2019

    Today, MDN announced their first-ever needs assessment survey for web developers and designers. The survey takes about 20 minutes and asks a variety of questions aimed at understanding the joys, frustrations, needs and wants of everyday web-makers. Mozilla have committed to making the results of the survey public later this year, and the survey itself […]

  • Optimizing Scratch 3 Pen Blocks

    Z Goddard - July 10th, 2019

    Earlier this year, we shared our work on the launch of Scratch 3.0, a major version of the visual programming environment for children of all ages. The new version of Scratch marked a complete rewrite of the runtime in JavaScript leveraging open web APIs. In our previous post, we enumerated the many performance optimizations that […]

  • Widening the Web with ECMA-402: Our work on the Internationalization Extension to JavaScript

    Valerie Young - May 30th, 2019

    Inconsistencies across browser implementations have caused web authors and users headaches since the dawn of time (or at least Jan 1, 1970), but nowhere has that pain been felt more acutely than in the realm of language and regional internationalization and localization. We have an inclusion gap on the web. Web authoring tools structurally exclude […]

  • Glitching Scratch 3.0 on an Embedded Web Game Console

    Boaz Sender, Corey Frang, and Amal Hussein - May 29th, 2019

    Today, we are excited to announce our partnership with JoyLabz, which began in 2017 and has centered around the development of a new game console called GameBender. JoyLabz, developers of Makey Makey and Drawdio, and founded by former Lifelong Kindergarten researcher Jay Silver, has been an incredible partner. We are excited to finally share the […]

  • Test262 Helps Advance JavaScript Proposals to Standardization

    Seth Thompson - April 11th, 2019

    Test262 is a conformance test suite for ECMAScript, the programming language on which JavaScript is based. Containing 36,103 individual tests at the time of this writing, Test262 ensures that different implementations of the language, such as the JavaScript engines in web browsers or stand-alone runtimes like Node.js or Moddable XS, agree on the minutiae of […]

  • Porting Scratch from Flash to JavaScript: Performance, Interoperability and Extensions

    Corey Frang - February 28th, 2019

    Last year we formed a team focused on using the growing number of new web APIs to build multimedia applications that push the edge of the web platform. Our main work in this area over the last 2 years has been with the wonderful team behind Scratch at MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK), and with […]

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  • The Eight-Month Omelette: adding a feature to one million conformance tests

    Mike Pennisi - December 5th, 2018

    The web-platform-tests project (WPT) houses over a million tests written to ensure our browsers provide a consistent experience of the web. WPT predates most of today’s popular JavaScript testing frameworks, so it implements one of its own: testharness.js. In December of 2017, I offered to extend testharness.js with a new feature. No one expected this […]

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  • Announcing Test262 Report

    Rick Waldron and Boaz Sender - November 7th, 2018

    Today we’re launching Test262 Report to provide JavaScript developers with up-to-date information on the state of new and existing language features across implementations. Test262 Report is based on daily runs of Test262, the ECMA-262 (“ECMAScript” or “JavaScript”) test suite, in nightly builds of JavaScript engines, and visualizes at-a-glance status of feature implementation progress. Taking a […]

  • New Test262 Import and Runner in WebKit

    Rick Waldron - October 16th, 2018

    Bocoup recently facilitated an update to the WebKit project’s interaction with Test262. In this article, I’ll cover what this means for the WebKit project and the JavaScript ecosystem, as well as what exactly has been done in the WebKit project to help make this process more repeatable. Test262 is a project maintained by Ecma’s TC39. […]

  • The State of Fieldset Interoperability

    Simon Pieters - September 19th, 2018

    We recently started working with browser implementers to improve the state of fieldset, the 21 year old feature in HTML, that provides form accessibility benefits to assistive technologies like screen readers. It suffers from a number of interoperability bugs that make it difficult for web developers to use. Here is an example form grouped with […]

  • WPT Workshop Report

    Mike Pennisi and Simon Pieters - July 19th, 2018

    On June 13, operations screeched to a halt here at Bocoup. The phones were ringing, but we didn’t answer them. Packages delivered to our door went ignored. Chicken eggs piled up. All hands were on keyboards, collaborating on the web-platform-tests project. We’ve been participating in WPT for years, largely in collaboration with the Chromium, Gecko […]

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  • Introducing Gaia

    Boaz Sender - July 9th, 2018

    I’m excited to share that our technical partnerships team has developed a deeper focus on graphics and interactive application programming, a focus area which we are affectionately calling Gaia. As of today, Technical Partnerships is now Graphics and Interactive Applications (Gaia for short). In many ways this is a reflection of what this team has […]

  • Adapter Pattern – A Must for Vendor & Service Integrations

    Brendan McLoughlin - May 1st, 2018

    Software development is a costly process. Requirements need to be gathered, decisions need to be made, and resources need to be scheduled to write the software. All of these steps require an investment of time and money to get a feature to the point where it starts bringing value to a business. After the feature […]

  • Lorin, Redrafted

    Mike Pennisi - December 1st, 2017

    Our pal Lorin Bond has headed out Californee Way to seek her fortune in her home state. She’s done a lot of good around these parts over the past few years, and we wanted to make sure everybody knows about it. From the get-go, we all knew we wanted to work with Lorin. For some, […]

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  • I Slipped on JavaScript’s Banana Peel

    Mike Pennisi - November 20th, 2017

    Think of the last time you goofed up on the job. Maybe you forgot to clean out the microwave in the break room. Maybe you hit “Reply All” when you really meant “Reply.” Or maybe you nodded off during an all-hands meeting. Probably your mistake was a little less banal than any of that, but […]

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  • The Other Bob

    Mike Pennisi - October 13th, 2017

    Bob Holt was an easy hire. He had plenty of experience as a front-end developer. He was engaged in the Boston web development community, meaning he was no stranger to the Bocoup Loft. And beyond just wielding open source software, Bob maintained an offering of his own: Keel.js. He was doing us proud from the […]

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  • This One Outgrew Her Shell

    Mike Pennisi - October 1st, 2017

    Can you tell me what EBITDA stands for? No? Okay, well, how many varieties of sea slugs can you name? None?! Clearly, you have never worked with Jasmin Jata. She taught us all this and more over the past 3 years. Although Jasmin joined us with a good deal of experience under her belt, she […]

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  • A Powellful Farewell

    Mike Pennisi - September 14th, 2017

    To the best of our knowledge, Laura Powell is the only person to lie to us while interviewing. She shared a tall tale about an unfortunate series of events during a wedding, and she challenged us to spot the fib. While deception was not a tool she would employ again, her knack for storytelling was […]

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  • Moving forward with the Open Web

    Jory Burson and Boaz Sender - September 8th, 2017

    We’re announcing some big changes to our teams and a new focus area for Bocoup. First, we have made the difficult decision to close our design and data visualization services in order to plant deeper roots as an open web engineering company. As a result, many of our teammates have moved on to pursue other […]

  • The Next Steps For TC39

    Leo Balter - August 10th, 2017

    It’s been more than an year since I started attending TC39 meetings, and this most recent meeting felt much like the first, as I faced a new personal challenge: I went there as the acting chair. TC39 is a group of almost 50 highly skilled professionals, each with very strong positions on the existing form […]

  • The Caper of the Flaky Test

    Mike Pennisi - August 3rd, 2017

    The test showed up on my desk just like any other. There I was, working with Google’s Web Platform Predictability team to find so-called “flaky” tests in the venerable Web Platform Tests project. I’d run a hundred or so at a time, over and over again, looking for any that reported inconsistent results. It was […]

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  • Keep on inspiring us, Yannick!

    Mike Pennisi - July 28th, 2017

    Our pal Yannick has left Bocoup to pursue his interests in data visualization at Google. We’re excited to see what he does next, but we wanted to take a minute to reflect on all the great things we did together over the past four years. Yannick’s reputation precedes him; from the day he started, we […]

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  • Accessibility for Robots

    Mike Pennisi - July 26th, 2017

    Maybe you’re not a “people person.” It’s not that you dislike other humans, but you recognize certain realities of your work. Your day job is maintaining a web application, after all, not carousing with your users. You know that accessibility is an important topic, but you haven’t been able to find the time to learn […]

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  • Peter Changes Divisions

    Mike Pennisi - July 21st, 2017

    Peter Beshai has hung up his Bocoup jersey so that he can continue to challenge himself in the field of data visualization. We wanted to take a moment to talk about why Peter will always be a member of this team, wherever he plays Peter’s first order of business was creating an interactive experience for […]

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  • Irene.next()

    Mike Pennisi - July 18th, 2017

    Following a six-year stint as Bocoup’s leader in data visualization, Irene Ros has struck out on a new path with Google. In this post, we’d like to celebrate her many contributions to Bocoup over the years. Let’s get the obvious stuff out the way, first. Irene started Bocoup’s data visualization initiative with the declaration, “I […]

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  • Agile Methods for Tackling Technical Debt

    Matt Surabian - July 14th, 2017

    Managing technical debt is such an important part of software development we include this goal in every contract we send out: Reduce or eliminate technical debt. All complex projects accumulate some form of technical debt. In extreme cases, it can cause project velocity to slow to a crawl. In this post we’ll review a few […]

  • Lyza’s Laser Focus

    Mike Pennisi - June 30th, 2017

    When we first welcomed Lyza Gardner to our team, we knew her to be an especially thorough sort of web developer. Now that she’s struck out on her own, it’s a good time to document how she maintained that reputation during her time at Bocoup. Lyza floored us with a presentation all about the burgeoning […]

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