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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 […]

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 […]

NVDA stands for NonVisual Desktop Access and is a FREE screen reading app for Windows OS. Emphasis on the “free”, as there are other Windows screen readers out there with prices that will make you spit-take across your monitor. (Is there such a thing as a subtweet inside a blog post?) If you do end […]

How do you visualize the “Health of the Internet”? This was the challenge posed to the Data Vis team at Bocoup by our client Measurement Lab, a nonprofit that collects millions of Internet speed tests every month from around the world since 2009. This data is invaluable to policy makers, researchers, and the general public […]

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 […]

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 […]

The following is a transcript of a talk given at various events throughout 2016, including Smashing Conf NYC, and An Event Apart Chicago. I’d like to begin with an exercise in relaxation. As many of you know, I am the picture of mellowness—ol’ Namasté Marquis, they call me. So, close your laptops. Close ’em. No […]

Designing in a vacuum is challenging. It’s more than challenging – it’s hard, painful, sad, depressing, defeating, pointless, infuriating, lonely – you get my point? It can potentially be debilitating for a creative to be working in a silo, which from time to time could happen on a project. To address this, we are experimenting […]

Last year we had a successful Knight Foundation Prototype Grant-funded collaboration with the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab (IDL) to improve their Voyager data exploration tool. At the end of our collaboration we knew we wanted to work with the amazing team from the IDL again, so we were thrilled when Jeff Heer & […]

To me, the JavaScript language is as beautiful and unexpectedly wondrous as a mini donkey. If I could propose a new cover for the book Beautiful JavaScript, I would choose this one: The reason I find JavaScript beautiful is that there’s something new to learn everyday. For example, recently I learned some surprising facts about […]

I’m honored to have been named lead maintainer of JSHint. Following in Anton‘s footsteps, I’m excited to carry on his vision for the project and see it forward. In addition to overseeing regular maintenance of the project, my primary goal will be to prepare JSHint for ES6. Stewarding this work will be an exciting challenge, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

The 5-dimensional Web Today’s web has at least five dimensions: Width Height Time – Site content is constantly changing and being added. Hardware – Content needs to be usable on a variety of devices. Software – Different users have different browser capabilities and settings. Good websites embrace this complexity as a competitive advantage. Bad websites […]

Paul Irish recently gave a talk at Bocoup with a dire warning: “The Mobile Web is in Trouble.” The general theme of the talk, somewhat apparent from the title, revolved around developers moving to native apps for performance, capabilities and discoverability. Near the end of the talk he offered a challenge–developers working on the Open […]

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 […]

I may as well come out and say it. In 2010, I leapt directly from Dreamweaver to vim as my primary editor. (I’ve been told that I may be the only person ever to have made this jump, but have no concrete evidence to substantiate this claim.) I had grown tired of Dreamweaver’s engorged appetite […]

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 […]

I’ve recently been working on an update to JavaScript Debug, which has me doing a lot of cross-browser testing, and I noticed a few “interesting quirks” with try…catch in Internet Explorer 6-8 that I couldn’t find documented anywhere. The Backstory Since the primary goal of JavaScript Debug is to normalize the console cross-browser, I’ve been […]

Interactive data visualization falls apart pretty quickly if the machine’s specs are not up to par. The last thing you want is your visualization to be slow and clunky. So when planning the graceful degradation of a visualization across a variety of systems, it is important to put some careful thought into testing things such […]