Developing Upwards

Wow! Web Components are amazing! Honestly, despite the negative title of this post I'm absolutely floored with excitement for this new set of technologies. This post is my exercise in grounding my excitement a bit with some reality discovered in actually using them in a serious project, and the issues we've run against and had to deal with. Web Components are an important part of the future of web development, and libraries like Polymer and X-Tags mean we can use much of their power today, without waiting browser support (which is already under way!) Like so many new technologies, this is also incomplete. It may be fair, it would be more accurate to say the ecosystem around Web Components is not mature , than to blame Web Components directly. Ecosystems are extremely important. Therefore, the items listed here are the parts of an ecosystem that I believe we need built around this new set of technologies. Missing Item 1: Routing Now this one took me by surprise because,...

Google Search is a prime example of a product that conquerors complexity and enables users to search through 25 billion pages in a fraction of a second. v ia the ever brilliant  Amir Salihefendic

Are you trying to understand AngularJS? I have been, and a few use cases have eluded me. Most importantly has been the intersection between AngularJS apps and services exposing browser storage to your app. What are the best practices? This example found on GitHub by Tom Wilson is an excellent example todo app built with AngularJS and PouchDB. The README explains the entire setup in an excellent tutorial! An AngularJS Tutorial that will walk you through creating a ToDo Application using a local PouchDb. This tutorial should introduce you to some of the AngularJS concepts like directives and data-binding. It will also show you how to build offline applications using PouchDb. If you're interested in this combination you should check out ngTodoPouch immediately!

  another great post from  Devil’s Dictionary of Programming   at Programming is Terrible simple — It solves my use case. opinionated — I don’t believe that your use case exists. elegant — The only use case is making me feel smart. lightweight — I don’t understand the use-cases the alternatives solve. configurable — It’s your job to make it usable. minimal — You’re going to have to write more code than I did to make it useful. util — A collection of wrappers around the standard library, battle worn, and copy-pasted from last weeks project into next weeks. dsl — A domain specific language, where code is written in one language and errors are given in another. framework — A product with the business logic removed, but all of the assumptions left in. documented —There are podcasts, screencasts and answers on stack overflow. startup — A business without a business plan. hackday — A competition where the entry fee is sleep deprivation and the prize is vendor lock in. entrepr...

 James Hague wrote a great post about the emergent nature of complexity in computers. (emphasis added by me) The 8086 “AAA” instruction seemed like a good idea at the time. In the 1970s there was still a case to be made for operating on binary-coded decimal values, with two digits per byte. What’s the advantage of BCD? Large values can be easily displayed without multi-byte division or multiplication. “ASCII Adjust After Addition,” or AAA, was committed to the x86 hardware and 30+ years later it’s still there, emulated in microcode, in every i7 processor.    ... The UNIX  ls  utility seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s the poster child for the UNIX way: a small tool that does exactly one thing well. Here that thing is to display a list of filenames. But deciding exactly what filenames to display and in what format led to the addition of over 35 command-line switches. Now the man page for the BSD version of  ls  bears the shame of this foot...

A post  Natural Born Programmers  caught my eye the other day. An exerpt is below, but I recommend everyone go read the whole post. The idea of the natural born programmer really is a tremendously damaging and dangerous idea we need to fight against. The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate.  Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man There is nothing quite so destructive as the myth of the natural born programmer, the assumption that some magic genetic variation lets you write the most elegant web shops in lisp. In  Is Math a Gift?  , Dweck researches how this assumption undermines learning: We had found in our past research that viewing intellectual ability as a gift led students to question that ability and lose motivation when they encountered setbacks. In cont...

John McCarthy on AWS and APIs in 1962 via Patrick Collison

I took a dive into Flexbox layouts recently, and I'm blown away by how powerful, understandable, and flexible they are. This new at off layout options is so fabulous to use, it feels like you aren't even writing CSS (which historically deals with layouts so terribly that I couldn't even conceive of it being pleasant). In a minor tangent, I've got to wonder what affect this child have in our tooling. We don't have a great track record for CSS authoring tools, especially in terms of layout versus style. Could this change with the introduction of a clean, simple layout model our tools could actually present properly? I can definitely imagine a rich content editor utilizing the kind of controls already common over table layouts being applied to the flexible axes of this new scheme. We might, if we entertain the thought, finally be able to empower or non-condensing stingers to produce compliant CSS for the layouts they actually want in a system they can actually under...

The following is an excerpt from a press release between my employer and our partners at UNC and Duke on a new project: The web application development company  Caktus Group  has teamed up with researchers at the  UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases  and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens. This is my exciting new project and I'm hugely happy to be able to talk about it publicly! We've been hard at work in conjunction with our great partners at UNC and Duke, and its been a very rewarding project even so early in the lifecycle. I'm very confident about our success in really being able to help people, and really that  is the whole reason I want to build software in the first place. It has been a very rewarding project, and an amazing opportunity I've been given. As it happens, this is also our first mobile app. I've been doing a lot of resear...

When porting a chrome packaged app to a firefox packaged app you will need to do an inventory as to which chrome specific api’s you are using and create a level of abstraction around them, as the naming / capabilities of the api’s vary across the platforms. David Clarke did the great leg work breaking down the current differences between the Chrome App and Firefox OS APIs. This is a great resource for anyone building web apps today! Check it out today . I'd love to see this kept up to date somewhere.

One of my colleagues at Caktus Group, Mark, as written up one of the most useful tips for Django developers trying to make good test coverage easier to digest for you team. Test running time is often a barrier to getting teams to follow good testing practices. Now what if you are running a set of tests which are only using  SimpleTestCase  or the base  unittest.TestCase ? Then you don't really need the test database creation at all. Depending on the backend you are using, the number of tables you have and the number of tests you are running the database creation can take many times longer than running the test themselves. ...  we can skip the database creation/teardown. I recommend any Django developers taking a look at the very simple solution he's come up with , which I'm planning to absorb into all of my projects quickly.    

Plasmid is an in-browser database and I've been working on it for a few months, talked to many people about it, and finally reached a point where I can release an API stable version. There are two main components to Plasmid, developed separately. PlasmidJS is the in-browser database, based on the IndexedDB specification and supports recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. The second component is Plasmid Sync: a backend server that allows users to synchronize their in-browser databases between machines. I'm really excited about this and I hope to see what people can do with it. There are other projects like this around, most notably the excellent PouchDB project, but I think Plasmid has properties that make it a better fit for many needs. Download This release is PlasmidJS 0.2.0 and is available at Github and on the Plasmid GitHub page. 0.2.0 on Github 0.2.0 on the Website Jump Right In If you'd like to jump right in, check out ...

Pssst... You're reading this on my old blog. You should update your RSS reader for my new one ! I've been invited to attend what looks to be an amazing event, Edge Conference. Edge looked to be a different sort of conference, and I'm excited to see how it works. Edge is about everyone learning from everyone else, so you need to bring something to teach as well as a desire to learn. Every moment of the conference will be publicly available afterward. I hope that I can bring something to the discussion, and I feel that if I don't try to do so, I'm not getting as much as I could out of this. The format of Edge encourages and depends on it, in fact. We open each hour long session with a ten minute talk. After that, we’re into the discussion, and we keep it moving fast. We record everything, on video and in text. Everything is released for free to the world the moment the event ends. While I hope I'll be able to get in my two cents to wha...

I'm actually incredibly nervous. My talk is "Offline-First: an Approach to Modern Web Apps", and in it I'll be talking about dealing with how the assumptions of the web are turned upside-down by the notion of offline web apps, but also how this can help us deal with a host of issues that have plagued us for some time. Come see me speak in Raleigh, NC at the NC State Centennial Campus. The conference runs September 21-22, 2013. I've had a great time at the NCDevCon events the past two years, and I'm looking forward to contributing as a speaker this year!

This was originally posted on my new website , where you can read the full post. Please subscribe to the new feed there to follow new things I write.   The most well known, yet still problematic, area of data ownership in our web-based world is all the data we keep housed "in the cloud" in the machines of the services we use every day. The contents of your blog at Tumblr The documents your company shares on Google Drive Your to-do list at Nozbe or Remember the Milk The music you've bought and listen to at Amazon All your family photos kept safely (you hope) on Flickr All of these services hold the information that is important to you, that you depend on, in many cases defines a large part of who you are (your writings, your photos, your musical tastes). How often do you plan for these services having a major outage? Or vanishing entirely and forever? Or suffering some kind of terrible data loss? read more at www.ironfroggy.com/on/web-data-ownership/owning-y...

I haven’t burnt out, yet, but I can feel it coming. I’m not sure if this is something I can avoid, something inevitable, or maybe something I can soften the blow on and make a little less painful. I think there is a burn out on the way, and I’m going to at least be observant. Read the rest of my post at Medium

This is a repost from my new website . Please follow my new blog for future updates. What does it mean to "own" my data in a web-based world? I don't know what this means, but we should. Before the growing responsibilities of "The Web" is for us, owning my data meant the files sat on my own machine. It meant the files were in a format that was either human readable, or documented well enough that alternative tools could read it or convert it. It meant no vendor could die, or change its mind, and make my data useless to me. This isn't the case in the web today. read the rest of this post