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  • 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 […]

  • TXJS Node Workshop

    Greg Smith - June 12th, 2015

    We’re thrilled to announce a new workshop on July 23rd, the day prior to TXJS! Austin’s very own Bocouper Kassandra Perch aka Nodebotanist will be providing a full day workshop introducing server programming with Node.js. This workshop is particularly useful for front-end developers who are looking to expand their skills to include backend or full-stack […]

  • Pushing NodeBots Into The Future with Tessel 2

    Rick Waldron - April 1st, 2015

    On March 5, 2015, Technical Machine announced the next generation of their Tessel platform: the Tessel 2. Additionally, Technical Machine announced a prototype-to-production service for products that are built with the Tessel 2. These are both very exciting developments for the future of NodeBots. According to Technical Machine, the Tessel 2 builds on and grows […]

  • JavaScript: Current Detection and Measurement with Johnny-Five on Node.js

    Rick Waldron - July 22nd, 2014

    The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. In certain cases, it may be useful to know how much current is drawn from a specific load in a circuit. In this article, we’ll measure current draw, with and without a load. The load will […]

  • JavaScript: LED Matrix Display with Johnny-Five on Node.js

    Rick Waldron - July 9th, 2014

    The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. LED Matrix signs are everywhere: roadways (even cars themselves!), store awnings, offices, the grocery store deli, airports, train stations, taxi stands, libraries, alarm clocks, and so on. The use cases are so broad because the technology […]

  • JavaScript: Laser Intrusion Detection with Johnny-Five on Node.js

    Rick Waldron - June 5th, 2014

    The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. A fairly common security mechanism, the laser intrusion detection system (or laser trip wire), is actually the composition of two devices: Laser Photoresistor, or photocell The laser emits a beam of light directly at the photocell; […]

  • JavaScript: Relay Control with Johnny-Five on Node.js

    Rick Waldron - May 23rd, 2014

    The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. Do not attempt this tutorial with a voltage source greater than 24V A Relay is a type of actuator, or electrically controlled switch, that allows controlling one circuit with another circuit. The controller circuit is completely […]

  • JavaScript: Tilt Sensor with Johnny-Five on Node.js

    Rick Waldron - May 15th, 2014

    The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. A tilt sensor is a component that senses its own change in inclination. Similar to a button, tilt sensors are activated through a physical interaction mechanism; in the tilt sensor case, this is the act of […]

  • On-Board: Intel Galileo Programming with JavaScript and Node.js

    Rick Waldron - April 29th, 2014

    Nearly two years has passed since I wrote the article that introduced Johnny-Five as a new way to program Arduino microcontrollers with JavaScript on Node.js. In those two years a lot of exciting things have been created, despite the potentially restrictive paradigm that Johnny-Five programs exist in. The underlying Firmata platform protocol forces Johnny-Five programs […]

  • Proactive Node.js Development with Travis CI

    Mike Pennisi - March 13th, 2014

    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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  • Building Command Line Tools in Node with Liftoff

    Tyler Kellen - February 18th, 2014

    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 […]

  • How Node.js Makes Network Code More Testable

    Greg Smith - September 3rd, 2013

    Introduction Node.js, a server platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript engine, is changing the face of web development. While Node.js itself is fast and scalable, the open source community surrounding Node.js is constantly discovering new ways to make application development more productive. This article will show how Node.js network code can be easier to write automated […]

  • Realtime Node.js App: Building a Server

    Mike Pennisi - January 14th, 2013

    This post is the third in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built for PBS. You can read the series introduction here. Being familiar with the stress testing procedure is all well-and-good, but that knowledge won’t really help you unless you have a server to test. In […]

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  • Realtime Node.js App: Stress Testing Procedure

    Mike Pennisi - January 3rd, 2013

    This post is the second in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built for PBS. You can read the introduction here. This guide assumes you have a production server up and running. If you need help getting there, check out the final post in the series for […]

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  • Realtime Node.js App: A Stress Testing Story

    Mike Pennisi - December 18th, 2012

    This post is the first in a three-part series describing our investigations into scalability for a second screen application we built with PBS. You can read more about the project in the series introduction here. Some Background We built the Map Center second-screen application in Node.js with the help of a number of open-source libraries. […]

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  • Bocoup & PBS: Building and Scaling a Realtime Node.js Application

    Mike Pennisi - December 14th, 2012

    This summer, Bocoup worked with Mozilla and PBS to build an open source, real-time web application for the 2012 US Presidential election. When we began, PBS (specifically, the folks at News Hour) had already completed a client-side application called “Map Center“. Map Center enabled users to view US demographic data and experiment with electoral college […]

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  • Introducing Gith – GitHub WebHooks For Node

    Dan Heberden - September 18th, 2012

    GitHub offers a great feature called WebHook URLs. You can add a url to take advantage of git’s post-receive hook and get a POST request containing data related to a repository push (e.g., commits, tags, and head-resets). While the data is very detailed and thorough, its complexity and focus on mimicking the git operations make […]

  • JavaScript: Arduino Programming on Node.js

    Rick Waldron - May 15th, 2012

    Today is Tuesday, May 15th 2012. Just over a year ago, I discovered node-serialport by Chris Williams and went immediately to the closest Microcenter and purchased the Getting Started with Arduino kit. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested […]

  • Synchronizing HTML5 Slides with Node.js

    Tim Branyen - June 23rd, 2011

    I gave a talk in February on Advanced jQuery Templates that had an interesting and unique twist. Instead of changing slides using traditional presentation delivery methods such as a clicker or a laptop keyboard, I used my smartphone which made asynchronous calls to a Node.js server. The server then propagated events to all connected viewers, regardless of […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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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  • 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 […]

  • 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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  • 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 […]

  • 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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  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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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  • So Long, ajpiano

    Mike Pennisi - June 28th, 2017

    Adam Sontag came to Bocoup with a reputation for community support. Between his tireless commitment to newcomers in the #jquery IRC channel on freenode.net and his commanding presence on the yayQuery podcast, if you were learning jQuery in 2010, you probably got a tip or two from Adam. (We’d be remiss if we neglected to […]

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  • K.Adam Presses On

    Mike Pennisi - June 6th, 2017

    Following five excellent years of service, K.Adam White has left Bocoup. What can you do in five years of participation on the open web? K.Adam’s answer: quite a lot. K.Adam’s main squeeze has always been WordPress. He’d already made a name for himself in that project before he joined up at Bocoup, and he kept […]

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  • Moving Targets: A Case Study on Testing Web Standards

    Lyza Gardner - May 8th, 2017

    Recently, I had the opportunity to contribute to a massive, meaningful effort: the open-source Web Platform Tests (WPT) project. My task was to improve WPT test coverage for areas of the HTML specification dealing with navigation —things like the details of loading new web pages, browsing around the web, and opening new windows. I didn’t […]

  • Screencast Transcript: Improving Webpack Build Times

    Matt Surabian - May 3rd, 2017

    On February 15, 2017 we had a screencast to talk about how to improve webpack build times by utilizing the new webpack HardSource plugin created by our colleague Z Goddard. This post contains the video of that event along with a transcript and visual aids. If you’re interested in learning more about webpack, check out […]

  • Webpack: A simple loader

    Z Goddard - May 2nd, 2017

    A webpack loader is a Node module that tells webpack how to take some input content and transform it into output JavaScript. I often build one-off loaders to experiment or fulfill specific needs for projects—their most basic interface is simple, but can get a lot done. They can be pretty easy to follow and understand, […]

  • Smoothly animate thousands of points with HTML5 Canvas and D3

    Peter Beshai - March 16th, 2017

    Sometimes in life, you’ve just gotta move thousands of points around on the screen. For hundreds of points, this can be accomplished with D3 through d3-transition on SVG nodes, but this typically becomes too slow when you need to animate more than a thousand points. So how do you do it? Enter canvas. Each point […]

  • Three Years with the WordPress REST API

    K. Adam White - March 3rd, 2017

    In December WordPress 4.7 shipped with a built-in REST API, giving every WordPress site out-of-the-box REST endpoints for the core WordPress data types such as posts, comments and categories. This release is the culmination of almost four years of work by a globally-distributed contributor team, and I’m proud to say that here at Bocoup we’ve […]

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  • Announcing Chatter: a library for making interactive chat bots on slack and more

    Ben Alman - July 7th, 2016

    We’ve long been making bots with hardware, now we’re making them with software too! They started as simple one-off “report bots.” Basically, helpful commands that anyone in our Slack could use to show useful information like who’s out on a given day, or how much vacation time we’ve taken. We also made a bot where […]

  • J5 Alive! Announcing the Johnny-Five Inventor’s Kit from Bocoup and Sparkfun

    Adam Sontag - June 29th, 2016

    Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Johnny-Five Inventor’s Kit! You can head over to Sparkfun’s blog to read the full announcement from our very own Jory Burson, but here’s the quick version: After years of working to make it possible for people from all backgrounds to program hardware with JavaScript, we’ve collaborated […]

  • Making the Reconbots for Intel at Maker Faire Bay Area 2016

    Francis Gulotta - June 20th, 2016

    This year Intel and Bocoup joined forces to show what you can do at home with the Intel Edison and Johnny-Five. We built a roving robot with streaming video and touchscreen controls in a few days using off-the-shelf parts and under 600 lines of code. We named it Reconbot. Build and drive a robot with […]

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  • Reconbots Invade Maker Faire

    Jory Burson - May 19th, 2016

    Looking for some creative inspiration for your next hardware programming project? Come meet Rick Waldron, Francis Gulotta, and five of their newest robot friends this weekend at the Bay Area Maker Faire, May 20-22! Reconbots are WiFi car devices you drive from your phone using their live video stream and touchscreen controls. They are powered […]

  • Seams in JavaScript

    Mike Pennisi - March 17th, 2016

    Sometimes I’m not satisfied with the way things are. I wish they could be a little bit different, just for a moment. I deal with this desire in my personal life by sighing and gazing through a rain-dotted window. When writing code, I take a more productive approach: I use seams. During application development, there […]

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  • Say “Hello World” with Johnny-Five on Tessel 2

    Rick Waldron - February 22nd, 2016

    Back in April I wrote about Bocoup’s excitement for the recently announced Tessel 2 in “Pushing NodeBots Into The Future with Tessel 2”. Since then, we’ve worked side-by-side with the Tessel Project to help them realize their platform vision for the next stage in the evolution of the Tessel. With shipping underway, we’re excited to […]

  • Open Source Infrastructure: Deploying jQuery with Ansible

    Corey Frang - February 17th, 2016

    Over the last ten years, the servers that power jQuery and its associated projects have evolved from a single shared webhost to a complex fleet of more than thirty virtual machines. Recently, I have been working with the jQuery Foundation to reel in this decade of organic growth by standardizing the configuration management of our […]

  • Bocoup ♥ WordPress

    Bocoup - December 10th, 2015

    Illustration by Sue Lockwood We here at Bocoup want to take a moment to recognize two of our team members for their work on WordPress 4.4, which was released this week: Mat “Wilto” Marquis and K. Adam White. Mat, by his own description, was the lead noise-maker for the effort to get native responsive image […]

  • Learning Three.js With Real World Challenges (that have already been solved)

    Sue Lockwood - December 3rd, 2015

    Illustration by Sue Lockwood When exploring a new library or language, I like having a clear set of requirements with an end goal in mind. For me, learning new technologies through client work is ideal—I use the project requirements as a guide to push me to do things I might not normally try on my […]

  • Ansible-based Deployment Workflow for Modern Webapps and Websites

    Adam Sontag, Christine An, and Tyler Kellen - November 18th, 2015

    Illustration by Christine An Over the years, Bocoup has put a lot of open source work on the internet, and we’ve used a huge range of services to do so. In early 2014, it was possible to find our efforts hosted on Dreamhost, Media Temple, Linode, Github Pages, Rackspace, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Amazon, and more. Recently, […]

  • Welcome, Francis Gulotta!

    Adam Sontag - November 18th, 2015

    We’re servo-ing up some great news today: our coop is embiggened once again, with Francis Gulotta joining Bocoup as Director of Web Connected Devices. A lifelong New Yorker, Francis has spent his life immersed in building technology. He’s consulted for small businesses, schools, and startups on his own and at his agency, Wizard Development, served […]

  • Carry On, Wayward Branyen!

    Jory Burson - October 23rd, 2015

    Today we share the news that Tim Branyen has left Bocoup to watch join Netflix. While at Bocoup this time, Tim contributed important work to the Open Web, including NodeGit, the DOM diffing library diffhtml, and the templating engine combyne. We are excited to continue to help support and grow these innovative projects, and can’t […]

  • Needles, Haystacks, and the Canvas API

    Yannick Assogba - September 29th, 2015

    Rendering and animating a lot of objects while maintaining the interactivity we want to deliver is one challenge we sometimes face as creators of data visualizations. Dominikus Baur explores the axis of performance vs. developer pain in his OpenVis 2015 talk. In summary, higher level APIs such as the DOM and SVG offer a rich […]

  • Introducing the Moebio Framework

    Jim Vallandingham - September 15th, 2015

    The Bocoup Data Visualization Team is excited to announce the first public release of the Moebio Framework in collaboration with Santiago Ortiz and Moebio Labs. The Moebio Framework is a JavaScript Toolkit for analyzing and visualizing data in the browser. At the core of this JavaScript framework is a set of data types and functions […]

  • A Facade for Tooling with NPM Package Scripts

    K. Adam White - June 3rd, 2015

    We build a lot of software at Bocoup. Like other types of builders, we tend to grow attached to the particular sets of tools and scripts we use in our work. We don’t play favorites: my colleagues support Grunt, contribute to Gulp, and maintain stand-alone tools such as JSHint. It’s easy to take familiarity with […]

  • Announcing Johnny-Five.io

    Rick Waldron - April 24th, 2015

    After three years of community development, Johnny-Five has its own home on the web – we’re thrilled to announce johnny-five.io! The new site combines content from the repo, the wiki, tutorials from the Bocoup blog and several third-party websites into a single, easily-discoverable source: If you want to find the API documentation, that’s right here. […]

  • Bocoup’s Most Important (Empty) GitHub Repo

    Greg Smith - January 9th, 2015

    Bocoup loves GitHub. Our code lives there, we collaborate and code review using Pull Requests, and it makes deployment a breeze. For the last year, we’ve even started using GitHub to manage Bocoup. What? As Bocoup has grown, we’ve started using new tools to manage information internally. We wanted a company Wiki, but which one […]

  • Assembling and Preparing the RobotsConf Sumobot with Johnny-Five

    Rick Waldron - December 19th, 2014

    At this year’s RobotsConf, the theme of the event was “Everyone Builds a Robot”. Creator and curator Chris Williams facilitated this by including a SumoBot Kit (designed and produced by Paweł Szymczykowski) and an ARDX Starter Kit for Arduino in the “swag bag” that every attendee received at registration. The bag also included an Arduino […]

  • Welcome Kassandra Perch

    Jory Burson - December 15th, 2014

    We have been perched on the edge of our seats waiting to announce our newest Bocouper: Kassandra Perch! Kassandra hails from Austin and joins us most recently from RetailMeNot, where she worked on UI engineering and developer evangelism. She’s also active in NodeBots, contributing projects and events for the community, all while sporting a number […]

  • Npm By Numbers, an Analysis and Visualization of the npm Ecosystem

    Irene Ros - December 8th, 2014

    Many of us use npm on a daily basis to manage our server-side and client-side dependencies, but do we know what goes on behind the scenes? What does the npm ecosystem look like from 10,000 feet? We set out to answer some of those questions in September of this year and are really excited to […]

  • Welcome Brian J Brennan

    Adam Sontag - December 1st, 2014

    As we return from the holiday weekend, we’re giving thanks for the newest addition to the Bocoup team: Brian J Brennan! Brian hails from New York City and joins us from the Mozilla Foundation, where he spent the last 3.916 years spearheading the Open Badges initiative and releasing a veritable cornucopia of open source libraries. […]

  • Intel Galileo: Autonomous Navigation Rover with JavaScript

    Rick Waldron - October 27th, 2014

    Earlier this year, I published an article that announced support for running Johnny-Five programs directly from an Intel Galileo Generation 2 single board computer. Since then, a lot of work has gone into fine tuning Galileo-IO, including a complete internal redesign that takes advantage of native I/O bindings and processing capability improvements whenever possible. Over […]

  • JavaScript: A Digital Clock with Johnny-Five

    Rick Waldron - August 13th, 2014

    The Johnny-Five Tutorial Series is geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. When I first started writing (copy and pasting) JavaScript in 1999, I focused solely on IE 5 (available on PC, Mac and UNIX; but I had no idea what it was truly capable of) and concerned […]

  • New Experiments in CSS Tooling

    Greg Smith - July 21st, 2014

    CSS is awful, but it doesn’t have to be that way. For example, new languages that compile to CSS like Stylus, Less, and Sass have made it much less painful to lay out and style web projects. However, these projects are limited: they provide delicious, delicious sugar, but ultimately they are using the same core […]

  • Working with D3.js and Canvas: When and How

    Irene Ros - July 17th, 2014

    We can create charts quickly when working with D3.js and standard DOM elements, but that comes with a key limitation: the number of nodes we can render is fairly small. Have you ever tried to render a scatterplot with 1000+ circles in SVG? If you have, then you’ve probably seen your browser crumble under the […]

  • A Look at New Classes from Bocoup

    Bob Holt - July 15th, 2014

    Back in May, we announced our updated lineup of classes. I want to take a moment to highlight some of our new additions we’re very excited about as well as some returning favorites. In this installment, we’ll look at the classes we’re offering in August. In a future post, we’ll take a look at what […]

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  • Improve Your Tests by Breaking the Rules

    Mike Pennisi - July 14th, 2014

    For many developers, writing tests is a hassle that would be best put off till tomorrow. For one, nothing can compete with the direct impact of writing great application logic. No user ever shared feedback like, “The UI was really pleasant and the functional tests were well-organized and readable.” There’s not much I can say […]

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  • JavaScript: ESC Programming and Brushless Motors on Intel Galileo

    Rick Waldron - June 9th, 2014

    Previously: On-Board: Intel Galileo Programming with JavaScript and Node.js, and JavaScript: Verifying Analog Write on Intel Galileo At Bocoup, we’re commited to exploring JavaScript hardware programming; as a result of those efforts we’re excited to share a breakthrough today: This is especially exciting as it marks the first time ever that a JavaScript program was […]

  • JavaScript: Verifying Analog Write on Intel Galileo

    Rick Waldron - June 3rd, 2014

    Previously: On-Board: Intel Galileo Programming with JavaScript and Node.js When working with emerging platforms, it’s common to find yourself in a position where the platform itself requires some form of testing or validation. Often, it’s not clear how to execute these sort of validations. Thankfully, when the platform’s hardware and software is completely open, the […]

  • Welcome Carl Danley

    Adam Sontag - June 2nd, 2014

    With the beginning of summer upon us, we’re excited to announce the first Floridian addition to our engineering team: Carl Danley! Carl’s been an active contributor to the WordPress community over the past few years while plying his trade at 10up, all the while his zest for JavaScript growing. He’s also been fairly prolific working […]

  • Announcing Summer 2014 Classes

    Bob Holt - May 15th, 2014

    We’ve had more and more requests recently to expand our curriculum in a number of different directions. I’m happy to announce that we’re bringing some of these classes to you this summer. New dates have been added in Boston for all of Bocoup’s much-loved Open Web classes. We’ll also teach our three most popular classes […]

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  • JavaScript: Arduino, Kinect Controlled Robot Arm

    Rick Waldron - March 10th, 2014

    Johnny-Five was first released in 2012 and since then, we’ve spent a lot of time attempting to “prove” that JavaScript is capable of things that robotics programming has long taken for granted. Specifically, we’ve used the Johnny-Five framework to recreate popular hobbyist robotics projects that were previously written in C. In this article, I’m presenting […]

  • My Experience as a Bocoup Fellow

    Lidza Louina - January 20th, 2014

    Hi, I’m Lidza, and I’ve just completed the Open Web Engineering Fellowship at Bocoup – this post is about my experience learning web application development. Background The Open Web Engineering Fellowship at Bocoup was my first experience with front-end web application development. My background is in working with the Linux Kernel, specifically device drivers. While […]

  • Building HTML5 Games with GSN Games

    Greg Smith - January 16th, 2014

    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 […]

  • Welcome Tyler Kellen

    Jory Burson - January 6th, 2014

    I’m thrilled to announce that Tyler Kellen has joined our engineering team at Bocoup! Tyler has long been a core contributor to Grunt, working alongside Ben Alman to release Grunt 0.4 as well as numerous patches and plugins. Tyler has also collaborated on multiple Open Source projects, and is currently working on node-task and other […]

  • Building Multiplayer HTML5 Games with Cloak

    Greg Smith - October 28th, 2013

    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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Welcome Corey Frang

    cassie irwin - April 4th, 2013

    We’re excited to announce that our friend and colleague Corey Frang has joined us at Bocoup. Corey is a talented programmer and computer scientist who has long been a contributor to open source technologies. As a jQuery core committer, Corey led the jQuery Effects rewrite, and currently serves on the jQuery Foundation Board of Directors. […]

  • 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 […]

  • Hangout with Bocoup

    Jory Burson - February 18th, 2013

    The Bocoup Loft is a fun and inspiring place to be. Between the technical debates and conversations amongst Bocoupers, regularly scheduled classes and meetups, and the occasional banana-themed event, 355 Congress St. is a very lively place! For the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with bringing that liveliness online via our Bocoup on Air […]

  • ReConstitution 2012 – Live Debate Deconstruction and Visualization

    Darius Kazemi - October 16th, 2012

    If you’re planning to catch the U.S. presidential debates tonight, you should have a second screen open and a browser pointed to ReConstitution 2012, a web application that we collaborated on with Sosolimited for The Creators Project. ReConstitution 2012 is a live deconstruction of the presidential debates. It scrapes the closed caption data from the […]

  • Bocoup on Air: Making Robots with JavaScript

    Rebecca Murphey - September 12th, 2012

    In case you missed it, Rick Waldron and I got together recently to talk about Johnny Five, a library that lets you control an Arduino using JavaScript. Rick showed off some of his Johnny Five creations — including a dancing robot — and I got to geek out a bit more about shift registers and […]

  • Welcome Darius Kazemi

    Boaz Sender - September 6th, 2012

    We are excited to announce that Darius Kazemi has joined our team to focus full time on HTML5 game development and evangelism. Darius brings a career of experience building and analyzing internet games. We are committed to helping open web technology succeed at Bocoup, but to date, we have focused on building software for startups […]

  • JavaScript: Arduino Bumper Switch Controlling a Led Tutorial

    Rick Waldron - July 17th, 2012

    Welcome to the third tutorial in our series geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. Johnny-Five is a Firmata based Arduino programming framework. See: JavaScript: Arduino Programming on Node.js. In the first tutorial you created a program to control a servo via REPL; then, in the second tutorial […]

  • JavaScript: Arduino Slide Controlling a Servo Tutorial

    Rick Waldron - May 24th, 2012

    Welcome to the second tutorial in our series geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Get caught up here. Johnny-Five is a Firmata based Arduino programming framework. See: JavaScript: Arduino Programming on Node.js. In the previous tutorial, you created a program that gave you a simple REPL control interface to a servo […]

  • JavaScript: Arduino Servo Control Tutorial

    Rick Waldron - May 18th, 2012

    This is the first tutorial in a new series geared towards Arduino programming on Node.js, using the Johnny-Five framework. Johnny-Five is a Firmata based Arduino programming framework. See: JavaScript: Arduino Programming on Node.js. At the end of the first article, I showed a simple program that would strobe an LED at the default rate of […]

  • Bocoup goes to the White House

    Irene Ros - May 17th, 2012

    Yesterday marked an exciting moment for myself and Bocoup. I spent the day at the White House Safety Data Jam in Washington, D.C., as part of the launch of the new Safety Data Initiative. As one of a group of 40 participants, I was invited to join other top technologists in the country as well […]

  • Introducing the Miso Project and Dataset Library

    Irene Ros - April 18th, 2012

    Over the past 3 months Bocoup has been working closely with the Guardian Interactive team on the Miso Project, a set of open source libraries designed to expedite and simplify the creation of data-driven interactive content. We are excited to announce the release of the first of these libraries called Dataset. You can see the […]

  • 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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  • Introducing Grunt

    Ben Alman - March 29th, 2012

    I’ve been working on a new open-source project lately. To be honest, I’ve been so busy coding that I haven’t had time to write about it, but since everyone at Bocoup got together the other day and told me I had to write a blog post—apparently they’re pretty excited—I’d like to introduce grunt. What is […]

  • JavaScript: WebRTC in Opera Mobile 12

    Rick Waldron - February 28th, 2012

    Yesterday, Opera announced and released the latest version of its mobile browser, Opera Mobile 12. Today, while running the browser against the Ringmark suite, I noticed that it was now passing the WebRTC detection tests. Very exciting, indeed! To test drive the first ever mobile browser implementation of WebRTC, I decided to use dmv — […]

  • Ringmark Launch

    Adam Sontag - February 27th, 2012

    This morning, at the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor announced Ringmark, the mobile web test suite that we’ve been working on with Facebook. At Bocoup, our mission is to further the evolution of the Open Web. That’s why we’ve gotten behind Ringmark with our JavaScript expertise. Ringmark comprehensively tests the […]

  • Easily Test jQuery Pre-Release Versions

    Dan Heberden - February 7th, 2012

    Get the complete code on github. It’s always exciting when a new major jQuery version (x.x.0) full of bug fixes, new features and performance improvements is released. But that fresh, out of the box excitement can get replaced with anxiety if you find bugs or performance issues with the latest version. This post will cover […]

  • Introducing The Backbone Boilerplate

    Tim Branyen - January 10th, 2012

    Over the past year Bocoup has worked on several production applications that utilize the MVC library Backbone.js. We’ve worked hard to give back to the community through informative blog posts, core contributions, support & evangelism through various mediums such as meetups, IRC and Twitter. Over the course of the past year, we created small boilerplates […]

  • Fieldrunners: Playing to the Strengths of HTML5 Audio and Web Audio

    Mike Pennisi - August 26th, 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 third in a series of weekly development blog posts. This week, we focused on incorporating sound into the Fieldrunners port. Lucky for us, in-browser audio support has come a long way […]

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