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The Tooling Tutorials
Last week myself and fellow Osmosoft colleague Colm Britton attended an all-day workshop in Brighton on useful tools and techniques for web development. In this post I’m going to provide a brief summary of what I found out.
There were 6 sessions in the day covering the following web development topics (I attended the first four):
Build
This session was presented by Remy Sharp and covered how to automate useful tasks for a web project using a tool called Grunt. This tool lets you easily run tasks such as testing (including watching for code changes and automatically re-running the tests) and concatinating/minifying JavaScript files for production deployment.
Modular JavaScript
This session was presented by Rebecca Murphey who talked about RequireJS. The talk covered the concept of writing small modules of JavaScript to make them more managable and structure web applications better. RequireJS modules avoid polluting the global namespace, which is considered a bad thing, and runs such that only the modules you explicitly need are loaded and used where necessary.
Version control with Git
Run by Jake Archibald who ran through a beginner’s guide to Git, which is a distributed version control system. Personally, I did not gain much from this as I have been using Git a lot since joining Osmosoft but I did discover a useful Git environment script written by Jake to make it easier to use common Git commands and see the current state of the project you are developing.
Debugging
Remy covered this session. He gave the group a small game application that was broken and asked us to debug it using Chrome. He went through the various developer tools Chrome gives you out of the box. There are some very powerful features including break points based on DOM events (such as clicks) and watching the DOM tree for changes in it’s structure. Finally, Remy showed us how to debug mobile web pages on the desktop via a proxy.
Testing
I didn’t attend this session but the presenter Rebecca Murphey has hosted the slides here: https://speakerdeck.com/rmurphey/writing-testable-javascript
SASS (pre-processing CSS)
Again, I did not attend this session. This was also presented by Jake Archibald.
More details of the event can be found here: http://2012.full-frontal.org/workshop/tooling. I also made some notes of the sessions on my Tiddlyspace.
Also, I’ll be presenting a more in-depth session on what I learned at a BT developer conference soon. The presentation material will be made available online after this. -
California
I’ve recently come crashing back into reality after getting married and going on honeymoon. My wife and I went to California and went on a road trip from San Francisco to San Diego. There was a hell of a lot to do in two weeks and I wanted to share some of the highlights and observations I picked up along the way.
Man, this state has it all! (Apart from reliable WiFi hotspots - even though there are many)
Before this trip I had never driven on “the other side” of the road and was a bit nervous of getting out of San Francisco onto the free way without satellite navigation. Thankfully, I think the grid system makes it easier to drive urban areas than anywhere in the UK. I wasn’t too bothered about getting lost or taking the long way round as I am a bit of a petrol head and have a thing for American muscle cars. I was impressed with my Dodge Charger but it wouldn’t make sense in any other country, it’s just too big.
Pretty much every stop was a highlight. I have been lucky enough to visit some fine wine regions in Australia (The Yarra Valley being a favourite) but Napa Valley has the quality wine, food and hospitality which gives it the edge for me.
Being able to freely wonder the Google campus was of course a personal favourite as well. I can see how the open and relaxed atmosphere around the place aids productivity.
Driving highway one was a great way to see the nature of the west coast. There are lots of birds and seals to see as well as some great state parks to explore, not to mention the neck-straining tall redwood trees. In most parks we went to, there was a distinct lack of wildlife so it was eerily peaceful.
The north and the south of the route varied wildly. From the small and quaint Carmel with it’s vintage looking shops nested in the hills to the many wooden piers of Santa Barbara and people-busy streets of Santa Monica.
After a getting through a lot of the vast expanse of urban jungle that is LA, it was refreshing to hit a more chilled San Diego which had a bit more culture too it. I recommend anyone who goes to take the Segway tour of the Gas lamp quarter and harbour front because a) you learn a lot and b) Segways are pretty damn cool.
After coming back to the UK, apart from thinking how much colder it was. I thought what British people might be like if we all said more things like “have a nice day” and “you’re welcome”. I also wonder where we’d be if the American can-do attitude ever caught on here.
As a final note, I’m hoping to post some pictures somewhere. The decent ones will probably end up on my Flickr page.
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Back to Blogging
I have recently changed jobs and I now work for BT Osmosoft. I am super happy to be here because it’s the opportunity to think and work like a small company but with the securities and other such benefits of a larger one. I used to do a lot of internal work but Osmosoft has an Open Source presence and I can finally share my code for others to use and critique (I expect mainly the latter will occur!)
I used to work on the middleware side of the software stack in unified communications but I have recently grown to enjoy front-end web development. The web used to be just a bunch of linked pages of content but now it’s pretty much everything from applications mimicking desktop counterparts to a Gameboy emulator. With technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3 it is also becoming an art form in it’s own right.
There has been much discussion in team meetings (read: pub visits) about our presence on the web and one thing that was mentioned was that we should blog more. So here I am making a start!
More to come…
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This week’s show now downloadable from http://t.co/Np1EwfXR and iTunes
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Live one hour early - 3 hours of total randomness!
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Last night’s show is now available for download http://t.co/Np1EwfXR
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thanks for listening, it was good to be back! Tracklisting and podcast due over the weekend.
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What to do with all this disco…
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Sorry for being quiet lately but all will be made up for this Thurs as the show returns to live broadcasting.Lots of deep and disco coming!
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Fixing Nexus 401s →
I have usually been stumped by 401 errors even though my credentials are correct. I thought I should save where I found the solution!
