On software projects, choosing a release schedule that works for both your team and your client is essential to long-term project health. Release too often, and you risk coming off as frantic and harried to your customers, your clients, or both. Release too seldom, and you risk appearing stodgy, inflexible, and unresponsive. Read more on Choosing the Right Release Cadence for Your Project…
Author: Joe Chrysler
Code Like a Craftsman with a Vim Clutch
Stroll around our Grand Rapids office, and you’ll find some unique input methods. Curved, split, and mechanical keyboards, mice shaped like everything from sashimi to joysticks, giant trackpads, drawing tablets, Echo Dots, and Yetis. We like to keep things interesting when it comes to our workspaces.
For the last hundred days, I’ve been kicking around a centuries-old input method in a new context. Here’s how you can set up your own Vim clutch.
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Three Tips to Make Your Next Dependency Upgrade Easier
Over time, even well-managed web apps can see their dependencies fall behind. The JavaScript community moves fast, and if you don’t stay on top of it, you can wind up with a package.json from the stone ages (two months ago). A few weeks ago, my team upgraded an aging Ember 1.13 app to Ember 2.10. Here are three tips to help make your dependency upgrade process go smoother than ours. Read more on Three Tips to Make Your Next Dependency Upgrade Easier…
For Better Meetings, Use Better Tools
I ❤️ meetings. There, I said it. Read more on For Better Meetings, Use Better Tools…
Supercharging Xamarin Studio’s Play Button with Custom Build Steps
As my team’s current project has morphed from a heavy Ember.js app running in a thin PhoneGap web view into a thin Ember.js front end driving a rich Xamarin back end, we’ve had to change our approach to build automation. Here’s how we leverage custom build steps in Xamarin Studio to make our workdays easier.
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Life After Text Mode: How I Learned to Stop Typing So Much and Love the GUI Again
The command line is a powerful abstraction in the developer’s toolbox—a succinct line of communication directly into the heart of the operating system. A skilled developer can take a small window filled with nothing but a blinking cursor and turn it into a productive environment for building websites, apps, and experiences that delight, amaze, and inspire. But sometimes, we developers get so caught up in the productive asceticism of the command line that we forget about the world outside and all it has to offer. Three apps have me rethinking my Text Mode lifestyle. Read more on Life After Text Mode: How I Learned to Stop Typing So Much and Love the GUI Again…
Super Fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 3
In Part 1 and Part 2, I showed you how we structured and styled a decimal picker for mobile devices. In this final part, we’ll set up a basic Ember.js app to showcase the control and then wire up its components.
Read more on Super Fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 3…
Super-fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, I laid the groundwork for setting up a custom decimal picker. In this post, I’ll show you how to finish styling the control. To make our decimal picker look just right, we employed some advanced CSS trickery.
Read more on Super-fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 2…
Super-fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 1
During a recent project, we were tasked with improving the experience of entering a handful of decimal numbers into a mobile web app. In this part of the app, we knew users would be repeatedly entering a number, followed by a decimal point, then two more numbers. The stock ascii keyboards were cumbersome, requiring seven taps and an awkward page scroll on most devices. The numeric keyboards saved a tap or two depending on the platform, but they still suffered from the page scroll problem. With either generic keyboard, we knew we’d have to add form validation to make sure the values were in the right range. Read more on Super-fast Numeric Input with HTML Ranges – Part 1…
Reduce Cognitive Overhead by Automating with GNU Make
Every project carries a certain amount of mental burden around with it. If you’re working with an IDE, you have to remember where the menu options live, a handful of keyboard shortcuts, and the elusive position of that one row of pixels you have to hit with your mouse to resize the debug panel.
If you’re lucky enough to be working in text mode, you have to remember which build tool to use, a handful of its commands, the version control system and its extensive collection of commands, and a myriad of Vim keybindings. None of these are essential components of the complicated thing that you’re building, and all of them impose some degree of background mental load on each member of the team. Read more on Reduce Cognitive Overhead by Automating with GNU Make…