Let's Build the Web We Want
I tweeted about it but I never added it my public calendar and… never posted about it here. Anyway, I’m going to present on canvas tomorrow night at HTML5 Boston. It will be great.
It’s also at the Arsenal complex (at Harvard Business Review), which means I’ll be having Isobar flashbacks. It also means I’ll be running the western end of the Charles River for the first time in a while. Super fun.
Want a free copy of my book? Sure you do. This month, I’m giving away a copy of my book right here on the blog (on this very post.)
The rules of this contest are simple, simply share an interesting/funny anecdote about your experience interviewing for a technology or agency position (no names or companies needed, blind items are fine.) At the end of October, I’ll pick the best one and you get a free copy of my book, Beginning HTML and CSS
And heck, even if you’re already an expert and don’t have need of a beginner book, you can certainly hand it off to someone looking to make their own site for the first time or to an engineer from another technology discipline looking to get introduced to the joys of web technology.
I’ve go a bunch of small updates to share (and one big one.) I’m starting with this one since it fits with the Angular kick I’ve been on.
I’ve recently gotten involved with the ng-grid project housed under the Angular UI banner. We’re using it at work, so it makes sense for me to pitch in to help keep the project humming along as best it can.
We had a meeting last week and hatched plans to rewrite the core of the project in order to juice performance and ease development going forward. Working in financial services, grids are a big deal for me and I’ve never been a huge fan of any of the ones out there. I’m hoping this project will end up being the quality grid I’ve always been looking for as a consumer.
While it’s called ng-grid at the moment, it’s going to get a name change for 3.0, in order to better fit with the rest of the Angular UI stable. I’m not 100% sure of this, since we haven’t followed up since the meeting, but it will likely be UI Grid.
So, yeah. If you’re an Angular type and are looking for a data grid, I’ve got your back.
I’m finally going to start using @roblarsenwww. I’ve had the account for a couple of years and have long had the plan to use it for tech tweets. As I’ve basically given up editing my other interests on @robreact, I figured now as as good a time as any to try to separate out the accounts. If you’re interested in technical subjects you’re not all that well served by @robreact and I’m enjoying the content I’ve been sharing there, so I’m not interested in changing what that looks like any time soon.
So, if you currently follow me @robreact, that account probably won’t change much. I don’t really talk about technical subjects there very often, so very often will just turn into never. @roblarsenwww will be only be about technical subjects. It’s basically content I don’t share at present. IF you’re interested in that stuff, follow me there.
Now you know.
It will look something like this:
My lighting talk from last night. Fun with @angularjs basics: http://t.co/bFCKzIRjH1 I'll be adding to it until it's a full hour.
— Rob Larsen (@roblarsenwww) September 5, 2013
How popular is CoffeScript, really? Not just in the Github echo chamber but in the real world?
— Rob Larsen (@roblarsenwww) September 5, 2013
Add sequential ids to a nodelist Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.getElementsByTagName("rectt"),function(elem,i){elem.id="loc"+i})
— Rob Larsen (@roblarsenwww) August 30, 2013
I reworked the way images are optimized in the Ant Build Script. After all the work I’d done to get it to 1.0 I discovered that a lot of the features we added to the image optimization process, coupled with a few hacks I threw in there myself, had made the image optimization tasks wonky on the Mac and on Linux. To that end, I reworked them, making them much simpler logically. I think the new changes are pretty foolproof (me, being the fool) but I need as many people as possible to test it to make sure I’ve really solved the problem. With these image issues fixed, I would release 1.1.0 and then sit back and see how things go. I’m really looking at getting the project to a nice stable place where I can just let it chill out and do its thing without me worrying about having stupid open bugs staring me in the face.
Which is where I am now.
Anyway, the branch is new-image-optimization.
To test you need some PNGs and JPGs in the img folder in an HTML5 Boilerplate structured project. Importantly, you need to test your version of OptiPNG. If it’s less than 0.7.0 and you can’t upgrade for some reason* you need to uncomment line 189 in your project.properties. If it’s above, just run ant and holler if your images aren’t getting optimized.
This is the issue to track issues with the new flow.
If this works, I can close like 6 bugs and release the patch** version. Which is the bee’s knees.
* This is some Mac thing. I’ve never quite understood why people just can’t upgrade their tools, but apparently something about the Mac stops you from being able to update a stupid little utility.
** I’m wondering if this should be a minor version since there’s a lot of “private” code rewritten to change the image optimization flow. 1.1.0? Maybe.