Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

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To The Moon And Back: Taking The Leap Towards Solving Big Problems – Front Porch Front-End Developer Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Julia Elman

 The Past

  • 1960: The Cultural Decade
  • Kennedy “get to the moon” speech
  • 1969 moon landing
  • New found awareness (earth’s atmosphere, etc.)
    • 1970 – EPA founded, Comprehensive clean air act, Earth Day founded
    • 1971 – Doctors without borders
    • 1972 – DDT was banned
    • “We went to the moon, but discovered the Earth for the first time.”

The Present

MIT Technology Review – You promised me Mars colonies, instead I got Facebook. (Buzz Aldrin)

Why aren’t we solving global problems with technology any more? We tend to over-engineer solutions.

Malaria, Cancer, etc.

We can solve big problems with 3 things aligned.

  1. Our institution supports solutions
  2. We actually understand the problem
  3. Active political leader and public working together to solve the problem.

The Future

Education – Logo programming on Apple IIe

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Context Aware CSS – Front Porch Front-End Developers Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Matthew Carver

Content needs context

defining contextual awareness

@media(sensor){adjustment}

Disseminating Active map information to mobile hosts

  • Historically the web takes its cues from traditional media
  • Google uses available data to extend contextual awareness across its products – Facebook does this well

 contextually aware web

  • user
  • task
  • environment

What can we tell about a user? Don’t confuse a user with a device.

Example users:

  • physically impaired
  • specific objectives
  • limited/meaningful scope

Example tasks:

  • repeated interactions
  • implied relationship

Example Technology

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  • mobile/tablet/pc
  • hardware limitations
  • input types

 Paul’s notes

Content is critical.
But content needs context.
  • Defining Contextual Awareness
  • Applications in web design
  • level 4 media queries
  • Summary

Responsive Image Strategies – Front Porch Front-End Developer Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Lindsey Norman

There are a lot of arguments and it is very complicated.

Scenario

Large retail client with a lot of imagery

Big Lesson #1: Responsive may seem old hat already, but it’s still new in a lot of organizations.

Responsive Web Design podcast

Big Lesson #2: Style Guides = awesome

Keeps everyone on the same page and is a reference point for changes.

Retina Revolution

  • Create image at 1.5 to 2 times larger than necessary and export at high compression

Percentage Crop

  • Full size for desktop, but crop for mobile
  • Involves moving the viewable area of image for smaller viewports
  • Addresses art direction use case
  • fast solution
  • easy to understand with minimal code

Creative team wanted more control with more crop sizes so created a Sass function

<picture> element allows to rearrange elements and show different sizes

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SVG Strikes Back – Front Porch Front-End Developers Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Matt Baxter

SVG – open graphics standard

vector-based, good for logos & icons, but not photos

vectors are scalable and are not affected by pixel density

SVG is ideal for multi-device web

All modern browsers support SVG (IE9+)

SVG is…

  • Resolution independent
  • small in file size
  • browser independent
  • simple to use

The DOM

Prototypes – you can create interactive prototypes and wireframes using SVG

slides

Developing Mobile Apps with The Ionic Framework – Front Porch Front-End Developers Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Justin Noel

Everyone wants to create an app. There are lots of platforms and cross-platform development costs a lot of money.

The Downsides of Native

  • Proficiency in each platform required
  • Extensive Development Setup required

Hybrid Apps

  • HTML5 that acts like native
  • Web wrapped in native layer
  • Direct access to native APIs
  • Cordova/Phonegap
  • Familiar web dev environment

Hybrid Apps have a Bad reputation, but they can be beautiful.

ionic is a beautiful, open source framework for developing hybrid mobile apps with HTML5. They have taken the traditional mobile UI and made it available within the framework.

ionic showcase

ionic creator is a WYSIWYG for creating hybrid apps.

There is a lot of setup to develop apps – lots of SDKs and programs to install. ionic has a virtual machine called ionic box with all of the necessary requirements to get started developing.

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Realtime for Reals – Front Porch Front-End Developers Conference, Dallas, TX

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Choose your captain: kirk vs picardPresented by Alexis Abril

FeathersJS is a wrapper for Express that allows you to easily create shared RESTful web services and real-time APIs using SocketIO and other websocket libraries.

Feathers revolves around the concept of service objects.

  • find
  • get
  • create
  • update
  • remove

Live coding the demo was awesome! Choose YOUR favorite Captain! Kirk vs Picard.

Storing data store in an array, but you could use a database. Using

Most of the best presentations have few notes because it was very interesting and included a lot of live coding. Github repo.

Client <-> Feathers <-> REST <-> DB

Dallas js meetup @dallasjs

 

SMACSS Your Sass Up Mina Markham – Front Porch Front-End Developers Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Mina Markham

SMACSS is not a framework. It’s an approach to authoring your style sheets. You can use

categorization

– base,
– layout, modules, states and themes

base styles are bare minimum (css reset)
layout styles are the grid system and any defining elements of your site (header/nav/etc)
modules is where you write the bulk of the css. components of pages
states are the active, collapsed, hidden or other states of your modules. You can use a separate naming convention for these
themes don’t always apply, but a theme can be a new skin for modules

base uses standard tags
layout can use a .layout prefix for your styles
modules use the name of the module
state styles can use a .is- prefix
theme can use .theme- prefix

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Deploying Websites With Capistrano – Front Porch Front-End Developers Conference, Dallas, TX

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Presented by Andrew Turner

There are lots of ways to deploy websites:

Try and avoid server-side editing and ftp.

Written in Ruby

Directory structure: server

  • current
  • releases
  • repo
  • shared

Make sure to point your web host’s document root to current as it is a symlink to the latest release.

Sounds like a deployment tool for Ruby, but it seems like it could be used for WordPress with git and WordPress.

Intro to WebGL and Three.js – Front Porch Front-End Developer Conference, Dallas, TX

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David Lyons - Intro to WebGL and Three.js - Front Porch Front-End Developer Conference, Dallas, TXPresented by David Lyons

What are people using WebGL for

  • games
  • interactive demos

three.js

  • 3D JavaScript Library – what would take hundreds of lines of code with raw WebGL only require a few lines using three.js

All three.js projects have the following elements:

  • scene
  • aspect
  • camera
  • renderer

WebGL - three.js geometryRotations use radians (using pi)

Lots of math, but lots of elements to help you figure out how to do it. Mesh, shading, colors, textures, shininess, etc., etc.

You can load in ojbects via the JSON loader with a python tool that’s included (must be Python 2.7).

Interactions

In 3D you have to use “picking” to select items. You don’t have the browser interactions available.

Great stuff on three.js from David Scott Lyons on his site!

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