Links from 2012

Our new ssg mix is a special live set from Ukkonen, who we think represents a bright, strange future of techno: http://t.co/CpPr7khS

The idea that a 10-person company of 20-somethings in Mesquite, Texas, could get its software on more computers than the largest software company in the world told him that something fundamental had changed about the nature of productivity [...] The success of Doom made it obvious that this was no longer the case. There was now little value in doing the same thing even twice; almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time.

Team leads are different. Your job, should you accept it, is to become what I’ve lovingly dubbed Shit Umbrella. Your goal is to find all of the peripheral stuff involved in getting the product out the door—important stuff, such as making sure the delivery schedule for the new servers makes sense for when you want to ship the product that needs them, or taking customer calls at 11 PM on a Sunday because their account quit working and they want to know why they should keep paying you, or figuring out when doing features the sales and support teams want makes financial sense—and then coming back and presenting a focused direction to all the developers so that they can get the features written without worrying about how they actually ship. You switch from doing the building yourself to enabling others to build stuff on your behalf.

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

An HTML5 presentation designed to familiarise developers with basic approaches to debugging jQuery and JavaScript code. It also introduces many of the common pitfalls most people encounter at some point on their jQuery journey.

I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying.

A system for managing resource dependencies for client-side browser applications.

Setting up a LAMP stack on Virtualbox.

The collaboration on apps like GitHub should be exactly what happens on blog posts. The readers posting comments should read the entire article, and should offer constructive, polite criticism and suggestions, without any unnecessary negativity.

Everyday Carry, or EDC, generally refers to small items or gadgets worn, carried, or made available in pockets, holsters, or bags on a daily basis to manage common tasks or for use in unexpected situations or emergencies.

Hadn't seen this 2005-era post before.

Web standards: trifle. Not web standards: fruit cake.

I'm not the only one who's fond of a good cake analogy.

"A slow savings account would work exactly like a regular account -- I could pay money into it, and transfer money out. The difference would be: when I pay money in to a slow savings account, it appears in the available balance exactly one year later." I want one of these.

Let that picture sink in: at 180KB of JS on average, script isn’t some helper that gives meaning to pages in the breech, it is the meaning of the page. Dress it up all you like, but that’s where this is going.

..."a task-based command line build tool for JavaScript projects."

"Year on year, the number of journeys taken on foot declines – indeed, on current projections walking will have died out altogether as a means of transport by the middle of this century. No longer subjected to the measure of man – or woman – or her oversight, the city has already acquired distorted lineaments: vastly extended thoroughfares are lined by cul-de-sacs, while the architecture defined by Rem Koolhaas as "junkspace" presumes that only a corridor can be a viable destination – especially if it has a cash machine."

Deeply fiddly but good to know it's possible.

I don’t use time signatures. People have mentioned that I use weird ones, but it’s not true! The way I write does not use them at all, it completely side-steps the whole concept. I use combinations of loops that are different lengths. Usually the length of any given loop is a two-figure odd number: 23, 51, 79 or whatever. You start combining four or five of those and you can end up with pieces of music that are made up of short repeating elements but the sound as a whole never repeats exactly, even after 17 minutes.

Uses git to clone a repository containing dotfiles, and saves them in ~/.homesick. It then allows you to symlink all the dotfiles into place with a single command.

Marketing in a not-too-horrible way

Overall, I think [technical debt is] a very powerful tool that -- when used wisely -- can be a great asset to any team. It seems to me that most of the people that I've been talking to really don't agree, and see Technical Debt as a plague that should be eliminated at first sight.

Gives webpages the ability to tell if the user's device is capable of viewing high-resolution images (such as the 3rd generation iPad) before the image is requested from the server. Additionally, it judges if the user's device currently has a fast enough network connection for high-resolution images. Depending on device display and network connectivity, foresight.js will request the appropriate image for the webpage.

localtunnel with apache virtual hosts, it can be done! +

Hacktastic. But the principle works.

"The reason this government's moving so quickly to divide the NHS into privatised contractual fiefdoms for its mates, and to divert education budgets into "free" schools for its mates' children, is because it can. Resistance has been atomised. Working-class rage, once articulated by powerful unions representing people doing proper jobs, has dissipated." Developers: unionise!

Javascript libraries for dealing with touch events, multitouch, normalizing across the Webkit/IE touch models, and all that jazz.