Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for Web Development

Managing a Large Front-End Project with Automated Build Tools

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by kperch at HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX

How do you manage a huge web application’s front-end when you have a diverse team of programmers, and javascript is not a strong suit for all of them? How do you handle both new and old code from multiple developers, and make sure only quality code makes it into your repos? Automated tools such as Yeoman and Grunt are not just for packaging your web project in a performant and clean package. They also allow you to enforce code quality and consistency through automated quality checking, testing, and beautification. This talk will go over the case study of a large web application in need of a refactor and test suite, and how tools such as Yeoman and Grunt allow you to implement a plan to bring projects like these back from the brink, without losing your sanity in the process.

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Backbone: 3 Ways

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by Pamela Fox at HTML5 Texas Conference, Austin, Texas (Deck)

Backbone is one of the most popular MVC frameworks for JavaScript these days, and one of the reasons for its popularity is that its minimal and lightweight. That makes it easy to use in different ways and adapt to different projects – but can also make it hard to learn. In this talk, I’ll start with Backbone basics, and then dive into three different ways that we use it to power the frontends of Coursera.org.

Backbone 3 Ways HTML5TX

Why use an MVC framework? Website includes: 242 js files, 28848 lines of code & 5-person frontend team. Needed more structure to their code.
Why Backbone?

Backbone JS MVC Diagram

Backbone is a lightweight model view controller framework. Models use set & get so the framework know what’s going on. Collections group objects together. Views with basic data binding. Router is available, but you don’t have to use it.

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Adaptive Images for Responsive Web Design

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by Christopher Schmitt at HTML5 Texas Conference, Austin, Texas (Deck)

“The open web doesn’t stop at our desktop. Smart phones and tablets not only contain more computing power and better browsers than the computers that started the Internet economy, they have better displays.In this session presented by Christopher Schmitt, we will work through tips and tricks to develop future friendly images in our sites and apps.”

Adaptive Images in Responsive Web Design

Think about the iPad, which presents so many design challenges. It can be wi-fi only or 3G, so bandwidth issues can be present. It has retina, so there can be display issues. When you design for web, you want to have great-looking images, but how do we get higher resolution images to those devices.

Why don’t we ask the browser? http://www.usearagentstring.com/ Available since the first browser Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), but browser put tons of stuff in the user agent string and can be spoofed. Instead of asking the browser, we do feature testing.

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HTML5 TX 2013

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HTML5 TX Opening CircleToday is the 2nd annual HTML5 Texas conference at St. Edwards University in Austin. Looking forward to learning some great HTML5 goodness today.

Important things for today:

  • Parking is available in any lot except the red lots (resident parking)
  • Great sponsors
  • Hackython with free copies of Kendo UI
  • Closing Party tonight

Open Spaces – Alan Stevens

HTML5TX Open Spaces by Alan Stevens

Open spaces technology allows for the important stuff that goes on at conferences in the hallways. An open space is a place where you can run an impromptu session on any topic. The first step is to propose a topic that you’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be related to other topics or the conference at all. Announce your topic and your name and put it on the board in one of the areas available. The only other responsibility is to show up. Then you can do whatever you want. Give a lecture or a presentation or a conversation. If no one shows up, that’s okay, too. Just stay there and see what happens. It is an amazing experience.

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I wanted to use Google Chrome to create this post, but I had to use Safari

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I started using a MacBook Pro a few months ago and haven’t had many issues with the transition. I’m finally getting used to the differences in how the operating system works and all the differences that you find out about as you go. Overall, it has been a good experience with the exception of all of the problems I have had with fonts. I have a font manager installed with way too many fonts and so I’ve been trying to pare them down to something more usable, but keep running into issues.

WordPress Font Messed Up in Google Chrome on Mac
WordPress Font Messed Up in Google Chrome on Mac

The first issue I had was with the Arial font. It was installed, but not active (or something like that) and so sites using the Arial font ended up showing a serif font instead. As a web developer, it was a little frustrating, but wasn’t a great hindrance to browsing or productivity, however. After playing with the font manager for a while, I finally got Arial to show up.

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The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web? at #SXSW2012

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Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #righttool
Panel discussion by Buzz Andersen (Dir of Mobile – Tumblr), Jacob Bijani (Prod Engineer – Tumblr), Majd Taby (Software Engineer – Facebook), Matthew Delaney (WebKit Engineer), and Tom Dale (Sr Software Engineer – Ember.js)

Apps are much easier to monetize than websites, because you can charge up front.

for Tumblr T-shirt Contest / 01 (Photo credit: albyantoniazzi)

The browser rendering engine does a lot of the heavy work that native developers have to contend with. The web browser is a highly evolved medium for content delivery and rich layout.

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Don’t Build a Power Glove: Talk to Your Users at #SXSW2012

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Monday, March 12, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX
by RJ Owen (Lead Experience Planner – EffectiveUI)

PowerGlove - Everything Else is Child's Play.

The Power Glove was a video game controller made by Mattel in 1989. It was the first wearable video game controller. The glove had lots of buttons and options in addition

Nintendo released two games with the Power Glove, including Super Glove Ball.

Marketing for the PowerGlove focused on immersion in the game. PowerGlove has captured the mind of the American public. It was even on Stephen Colbert recently. Even though it was really cool. It was a commercial failure.

The PowerGlove was

  • rated the 7th worst video game controller of all time
  • sold $88M US (failure)
  • japanese producer declared bankruptcy

It was so bad that people are still complaining about it today.

Bill Buxton – data design

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