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Bocoup has been offering a handful of user research workshops lately focusing on developing a process for working on design projects. Following the workshops, I have been pinged by tons of designers and engineers who are doing user research on a project requesting some support in a real-world application of the tools. Primarily, the main […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

As I started to learn about CSS Grid and the new base layout possibilities, I was struck by how much this changes things for design. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either: a search through CodePen reveals plenty of designers and developers thinking about this as well. There are so many new ways to […]

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 […]

Illustration courtesy Matt McLaughlin. It is 9:18 AM on August 21, 2021. You have just finished eating your space-breakfast, and you’re ready to get back to work maintaining the web presence for Omni Consumer Products. After about an hour, you find your latest change fails an acceptance test. It turns out to be a bug […]

Starting today, my long time collaborator Jory Burson becomes Bocoup’s new CEO. I am moving into a Research Director role to explore long-term open and inclusive technology development at Bocoup. Jory and Boaz in front of the Bocoup billboard, Spring 2014. Jory joined our team in 2011 to run education, transitioned to general operations in […]

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 […]

In just my first weeks at Bocoup, I’ve been learning a lot about performance and how to make a site smoking fast. Recently, we were hired to audit and help a client understand what they could do to improve their site speed, and through this project I learned the nuts of bolts of actually implementing […]

At Bocoup we believe that focusing on crafting resilient and accessible experiences is the most effective way to build digital services. This philosophy and practice extends to our learning design. In an earlier post, I talked about building a curriculum framework with a design driven approach—this involved user research, persona and journey map development, and […]

Education and learning have always been a core part of what we do at Bocoup. From our earliest days in Fort Point, we’ve held classes dedicated to teaching people to build on the Open Web, the subjects evolving along with the platform itself. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on a new format […]

This winter we will be offering a workshop series focusing on user experience design. We craft our educational offerings using similar practices to how we design products: using a goal oriented and design driven methodology. In this post, I’ll be sharing the process for how we went about developing this new workshop offering. Choose a […]

Recently, we announced our Knight Foundation Prototype Grant to work on Data Voyager, a tool for exploring the breadth and depth of a particular dataset with ease through automated visualization recommendations. Data Voyager was originally created as a research project by Jeff Heer’s Interactive Data Lab at the University of Washington (with implementation led by […]

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 […]

There is a notion in the software industry that teams are either “doing Scrum” or not. That is true in some cases, but the majority of teams are using a hybrid of methodologies based on their experiences and situation. Some of this apparent isolation is linguistic: Scrum has its own terminology for some notions that […]

Every time I contribute to JSHint, I learn a little more about JavaScript. My most recent fantastical knowledge adventure led me to the behavior of the name attribute of function objects. JSHint has an interesting but lesser-known feature: code analysis reports. When used programatically, JSHint will return an object with some data about the code […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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

We recently had the opportunity to work with the very talented team over at Climate Central, an independent organization of leading scientists and journalists researching and reporting the facts about our changing climate and its impact on the American public. The scarcity of resources that convey factual information about the effects of climate change in […]

We are excited to announce that Yannick Assogba has joined Bocoup’s consulting team! Yannick impressed us from the start with his experience building large client-side web applications, and his interest in pushing the boundaries of JavaScript to explore new ideas. We are thrilled to start moving the web forward with Yannick in his new capacity […]

We’re excited to announce that Eric O’Connor has joined our engineering team. Eric has been a member of the family for some time now, originally as a coworker at the Bocoup Loft, and then through the evening cryptography research that he and Mike worked on together at Bocoup. Eric is especially interested in language design, […]

Bocoup recently ran our first-ever OpenVis Conf May 16-17, 2013 in Boston. We were thrilled to bring together 216 developers, designers, and data researchers from around the globe to discuss moving data visualization forward on the Open Web. While data visualization and storytelling are well-established fields, combining these arts and bringing them to the web […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

We are happy to announce that Irene Ros will be joining our team to work on JavaScript visualizations, open web software and training. Irene comes to Bocoup from IBM, where she worked on the Lotus Notes team early in her career. Most recently Irene spent three years at IBM Research’s Visual Communication Lab where she […]

Augmented Reality: using JSARToolkit with WebGL & HTML5 Video Last week I spent some time running tests and generally familiarizing myself with the JSARToolkit code. I also built a JavaScript wrapper for the library to make it easier to use. JSARToolkit is a JavaScript library converted from FLARToolkit (Flash), and is developed for tracking AR […]

After updating to Chrome 5 (specifically 5.0.375.55) last night I immediately ran some tests to see if the Web Worker API had been updated to support postMessage() arguments of types other than string. Turns out, it had. Here’s the test, plus the results: https://gist.github.com/414901 renderer.html <script src=”renderer.js”></script> renderer.js var worker = new Worker(‘worker.js’); worker.addEventListener(‘message’, function […]

In this post I will talk about Mozilla’s Web Audio Data API. I will cover where we have come from, demonstrate some of the incredible results that have already been achieved; I will talk about why audio in the browser is so important, take a look at where we are headed and explore some of […]

I have been playing around with SVG Filters a lot over the last few weeks and I have to say that the SVG Filters are a) really freekin’ cool and b) powerful in ways yet undiscovered. When these things land cross-browser, it will really polish off the modern web-app paradigm, adding a level of depth […]