HTML images just got better, with the subtlest change to your codebase Photo by Adi Suyatno I know what you’re thinking. Scott, I landed on Medium on a small but not mobile-small display and the download chunk related to images in my home feed was like 7% smaller. First of all, thank you for noticing. Second, what if I told…
#web-development
70 posts
18 May
8 Oct 2025
Safari recently implemented a non-standard (yet?) CSS random() function (currently only in WebKit, and not yet part of any CSS specification). Since many recent CSS features are directly aimed at replacing common JavaScript functionality, I expected this function to do the same. While it has some neat use cases, it doesn’t cover most of the scenarios where I currently use…
29 Sept 2025
My presentation for Digital Collegium 2025 was an overview of many recent and forthcoming additions to the web platform, specifically HTML and CSS. Description Roll for sanity: Surviving the ever-expanding web feature bestiary Are you, brave front-end adventurer, feeling your sanity slipping as the Ever-Expanding Web Feature Bestiary grows with each browser update? Have you encountered strange and powerful creatures…
23 Sept 2024
My presentation for HighEdWeb 2024 was an overview of many recent and forthcoming additions to the web platform, specifically HTML and CSS. Description CSS is Awesome Over the past few years, CSS has been gaining features at a rate that is almost impossible to follow. Features that once required pre-processors are now native to the platform. Variables? Check. Nesting? Check.…
4 Jul 2024
TypeScript significantly improved JavaScript development with enhanced code reliability and maintainability, ensuring fewer runtime errors and greater productivity for developers. But when you start working with it, the syntax can sometimes feel overwhelming. One of the most intimidating features in TypeScript is “generics”. Look at the example below 🤯 aren’t you afraid ? Types declarations from @tanstack/react-query (library) that can…
15 May 2024
Prologue This is the fourth and final instalment of our series. In this piece, we’ll dive into our experiences and insights gained while tackling this project at Housing.com . Previous Chapter: CLS: Changing the perspective (Vol.3) Over the years we have tried a lot of approaches, some approaches required design inputs while on the other hand some ideas were tech…
9 Jan 2023
Author: Darragh Burke, Software Engineer II, Web Development at Tinder Tinder’s UI Opportunities: Wildfire When Tinder first launched in 2012, it pioneered a brand new user experience: the Swipe Right® and “Swipe Left”™ features. The app’s simplicity was a big part of what made it so appealing. An early version of Tinder We’ve emphasized building new features and moving fast…
17 May 2022
A great overview of all the latest and upcoming CSS features. Presented by Adam Argyle at Google I/O ‘22.
7 Feb 2022
We were recently testing PassKit as a way of managing membership cards for giving societies. Passkit is very up-front that they are not a CRM and strongly suggest using their API for integrating with outside systems, or for editing pretty much any data. To kick the tires, we set up some very basic scripts to connect to the Passkit API.…
6 Oct 2021
Philip Walton on the difficulties the webperf community faces when discussing web performance. Simple numbers don’t cut it. We need to provide context when discussing performance results. What concerns me about this practice is that it glosses over a lot of important nuance, and it perpetuates the idea that synthetic or lab-based tools (like Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and many others) are…
19 May 2021
We’ve provided Atom/RSS feeds for News and Events in our custom CMS at Notre Dame for well over a decade. However, if a visitor ended up on the url they were greeted with an unhelpful screen of XML. I decided to remedy this by appying some XSLT and styles to improve the user experience. However, even after reviewing several tutorials,…
4 Mar 2021
Joel Goodman of Bravery Media on the current state of HigherEd homepages. Regardless, it’s an agency’s responsibility to do as much as possible to make that website a success when it goes live. Do no harm. Slow websites only do harm. Code needs to be optimized, frameworks need to be ditched, images need to be properly sized and deferred, CSS…
20 Mar 2020
This articles describes the difference between how component invocation differs when using curlies {{...}}, angle brackets <...> or an (...) s-expression in Ember templates. Ember has three methods for invoking components and helpers in a template, either of the three can be used to invoke both classic and modern glimmer components. The “classic” syntax in the form that uses curly…
6 Oct 2019
Released a tiny npm package today: @0xadada/random-emoji, a javascript random emoji function with zero dependencies. $ yarn add @0xadada/random-emoji $ node > const random = require('@0xadada/random-emoji'); > random() '😁' let a = random(); // defaults to 'emoticons' let b = random('emoticons'); let c = random('food'); let d = random('animals'); let e = random('expressions'); console.log(a, b, c, d, e); // 😍…
16 Sept 2019
I love bookmarklets, those small and elegant lines of javascript that you can bookmark and which do random functions in the browser when clicked. uri-editor.js is 1-line of HTML that’ll run a text editor in your browser. Drag the link into your bookmarks to save it as a quick browser-based editor tool for those moments you need a quick editor…
1 Jul 2019
Multi-tenants is an architecture concept that can handle multiple projects in a single project container. If you look at popular sites like Nike.com or Mi.com, you will find out the project redirection based on the continent or country region. This post more about understanding the Angular 8 project package configuration, using this how are we leveraging the project for multi-tenant…
18 Jun 2019
This talk was presented at the Boston Ember.js Community meetup at Salsify, Inc about a unique usecase for deploying FastBoot in order to do server-side rendering of Ember applications at scale. I review traditional, single-page web applications, I discuss server-side rendering by introducing Ember FastBoot. I showcase our architecture and provide a quick summary of how we use FastBoot in…
25 Apr 2018
This talk is a code walkthrough, implementing a date picker to showcase the power of ember-changeset and contextual components. Given at the Ember Boston Community meetup. Ember-changeset is an addon that provides an abstraction over Ember models such that only valid data will ever be set in a model. Contextual components are a set of conventions that allow a developer…
5 Nov 2017
system-font-i18n-css provides twelve variations for the Sans-serif family of system font. This font stack provides more consistent character typesetting across multiple languages and all modern operating systems. system-font-i18n-css is optimized to select the best system font on a per-character basis, based on the unicode range of that character. system-font-i18n-css provides twelve variations for the Sans-serif family of system font. This…
14 Sept 2017
Recently I started a gig where I was handed a laptop and told I should take it home with me at night. Now this isn't the worst thing ever but I was already carrying one laptop with me (my personal/work laptop as opposed to the one given to me
19 Jul 2017
What is a slug? The term “slug” comes from the world of newspaper production. If you have ever created a simple “Blog” application you have already reinvented it. When you need to access any post at some URL you need to identify it somehow. The simplest idea is to identify them by id, but that does not seem too pretty.…
12 Jun 2017
When npm@5 was just released this question was the first one I have googled. No doubts it comes to mind since new npm version introduced a lot of yarn’s features. In other words: should I still use yarn after installing npm@5? Yarn features Why do people use yarn in the first place? npm had some known issues. Well, we all…
2 Jun 2017
We have already published how to generate mock data with the help of a Python library — Mimesis . The article you are reading now is the continuation of the previous one, therefore, we will not be going over the basics again. In case you missed out on the first article or you felt lazy at the time, you might…
24 May 2017
The ability to generate mock but valid data comes in handy in app development, where you need to work with databases. Filling in the database by hand is a time-consuming and tedious process, which can be done in three stages — gathering necessary information, post-processing the data and coding the data generator itself. It gets really complicated when you need…
14 May 2017
Phoenix Framework always has been awesome. But it was never as awesome as the new 1.3 release (which is rc1 right now actually). There are a lot of significant changes. Chris McCord made a great job writing a complete migrating guide . Inspired by it and by the talk Chris gave at the LonestarElixir this article will try to guide…
1 Apr 2017
Organize Django settings into multiple files and directories. Easily override and modify settings. Use wildcards and optional settings files. Managing Django’s settings might be tricky. There are severals issues which are encountered by any Django developer along the way. First one is caused by the default project structure. Django clearly offers us a single settings.py file. It seams reasonable at…
18 Mar 2017
ember-i18n-changeset-validations is an Ember addon providing internationalized validation messages to ember-changeset-validations. This addon adds the ability to translate ember-changeset-validation messages using the ember-i18n addon. Available on NPM at ember-i18n-changeset-validations and on github at ember-i18n-changeset-validations.
26 Jun 2016
Recommender Systems: Content-based, Social recommendations and Collaborative filtering
Federico CargneluttiWith the proliferation of video on-demand streaming services, viewers face a big challenge: finding content across multiple screens and apps. There may be quality information available online but it may be difficult to find. Traditionally, viewers resort to “app switching” which can be frustrating when it comes to finding quality content. With the emergence of […]
5 Nov 2015
Not too long ago, there was a great debate between two sides of the web. The “Responsive” web vs the “m.” web. One pushing for a single codebase that responds to user-context and another pushing for a second, mobile-only approach (typically using a subdomain starting with m.) It’s clear now, the responsive web has won. A Retrospective — Responsive Design…
8 Dec 2014
I’m working on a project that requires Geo proximity search. Basically, what I’m doing is plotting a radius around a point on a map, which is defined by the distance between two points on the map given their latitudes and longitudes. To achieve this I’m using the Haversine formula (spherical trigonometry). This equation is important […]
1 Mar 2013
Every selector you write is additional complexity that will need to be maintained. Can you generalize or abstract that selector so other components can use it? Write your CSS selectors to be as concise as possible Write your CSS selectors to be as performant as possible, efficient as possible and even more efficient Don’t overqualify your CSS selectors Use the…
12 May 2009
phpWatch is a general purpose service monitor that is able to send notifications of outages via e-mail or text-message (SMS). The purpose of this system is to allow administrators to easily check the status of many different services running on any number of servers and also allow developers to interface with the query and notification […]
22 Feb 2009
The Zend Framework is a very flexible system, in fact, it can be used to build practically anything. But, the problem with using a flexible system is that flexibility costs. And the cost of flexibility is complexity. Martin Fowler wrote: Every time you put extra stuff into your code to make it more flexible, you […]
1 Feb 2009
When you develop or deploy an application, dependency tracking is one of the problems you must solve. Keeping track of dependencies for every application you develop is not an easy task. To solve this problem I’ve created Zend_Debug_Include, a Zend Framework component that supports automatic dependency tracking. We all agree that dependencies cannot be maintained […]
4 Jan 2009
Jetty Web server can be invoked and installed as a stand alone application server. It has a flexible component based architecture that allows it to be easily deployed and integrated in a diverse range of instances. The project is supported by a growing community and a team with a history of being responsive to innovations […]
2 Jan 2009
Replication has its problems, specially if you have a multimaster replication system. To make matters worse, none of the PHP frameworks support multimaster replication systems nor handle master failover. Symfony uses Propel and only supports master-slave replication systems. When the master fails, it’s true that you have the slaves ready to replace it, but the […]
24 Dec 2008
If you are using the Memcache functions through a PECL extension, you can set global runtime configuration options by specifying the values within your php.ini file. One of them is memcache.hash_strategy. This option sets the hashing mechanism used to select and specifies which hash strategy to use: Standard (default) or Consistent. It’s recommended that you […]
18 Nov 2008
Many threats that are common to distributed systems are common to Web services as well. There are a few specific threats associated with the Web services processing model, such as: Message replays: An attacker may re-play an entire message or a part of a SOAP message. Man in the middle attack: An attacker may view […]
3 Nov 2008
When you’re building an infrastructure that is distributed all over the internet, you’ll come to a point where you can’t rely on synchronous remote calls that, for example, synchronize data on 2 servers: You don’t have any failover system that resends messages if something went wrong (network outages, software failures). Messages are processed over time […]
29 Sept 2008
Mike Brittain wrote: In the months prior to leaving Heavy, I led an exciting project to build a hosting platform for our online products on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We eventually launched our newest product at Heavy using EC2 as the primary hosting platform. We set out to build a fairly standard […]
25 Sept 2008
François Zaninotto wrote: When faced with the alternative between an off-the-shelf CMS or a custom development, many companies pick solutions like ezPublish or Drupal. In addition to being free, these CMS seem to fulfill all possible requirements. But while choosing an open-source solution is a great idea, going for a full-featured CMS may prove more […]
14 Sept 2008
In software engineering, “refactoring” source code means modifying it without changing its behaviour, and is sometimes informally referred to as “cleaning it up”. Refactoring neither fixes bugs nor adds new functionality, though it might precede either activity. Rather it improves the understandability of the code and changes its internal structure and design, and removes dead […]
4 Sept 2008
What does “favour composition over inheritance” mean, and why is it a good thing to do? Object composition and inheritance are two techniques for reusing functionality in object-oriented systems. In general, object composition should be favoured over inheritance. It promotes smaller, more focused classes and smaller inheritance hierarchies. Troels Knak-Nielsen wrote: Class inheritance is a […]
4 Aug 2008
The includes of the system map out the dependencies of the system, which files depend on which, which subsystem depends on which. When working with a system, it’s always useful to map out the dependencies before hand. Here are some examples: WordPress 2.2.1 http://wordpress.org MediaWiki 1.12 http://www.mediawiki.org/ phpBB 3.0 http://www.phpbb.com/ phpMyAdmin 2.9.1.1 http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ Symfony 1.1 […]
21 Jul 2008
I needed to automate the task of synchronizing files from one server to another, so I wrote a Phing task. Finally today I found some time to finish writing the documentation. Overview FileSyncTask is a Phing extension for Unix systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer. FileSyncTask […]
30 Jun 2008
Flickr Platform PHP MySQL Shards Memcached for a caching layer. Squid in reverse-proxy for html and images. Linux (RedHat) Smarty for templating Perl PEAR for XML and Email parsing ImageMagick, for image processing Java, for the node service Apache SystemImager for deployment Ganglia for distributed system monitoring Subcon stores essential system configuration files in a […]
28 Jun 2008
MVC is about loose-coupling, and Modular Programming takes that concept to the extreme. A modular application can dynamically load and unload modules at runtime, completely separate applications in their own right, which interact with the main application and other modules to perform some set of tasks. In this article you will presented with a different […]
pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. To have a complete overview of what pChart can do for you, we invite you to take a look on the on-line documentation which is trying to show all basic & […]
16 Jun 2008
Every getter and setter in your code represents a failure to encapsulate and creates unnecessary coupling. A profusion of getters and setters (also referred to as accessors, accessor methods, and properties) is a sign of a poorly designed set of classes. “Getters and setters should be avoided because they break the encapsulation OOP offers”, says […]
8 Jun 2008
Neil Grab wrote: One of the Zend Framework’s strongest drawing cards, as I see it, is its loosely-coupled structure. The name Zend Framework may be a misnomer, in fact, as ZF is more a set of reusable libraries than an actual application framework. I won’t go into detail about the advantages of loose coupling, but […]
7 Jun 2008
Jason McDonald posted some quick reference diagrams for the Gang of Four design patterns on his blog. Each section has the name of the pattern, a quick description, and the class diagram for the pattern. Definitely a handy thing to have around. Design Patterns Quick Reference (PDF)
22 May 2008
From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ideas. Here are the most influential open-source PHP applications to date: 1998 phpMyAdmin phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create […]
24 Apr 2008
I’m a big fan of PHP_CodeSniffer and I think it’s a great development tool, it ensures that you write code that is easy to read and maintain. But, what about making sure that the code you write is secure and doesn’t have any vulnerabilities? Right, there’s another tool for that… PHP Security Scanner is a […]
Web security is possibly today’s most overlooked aspect of securing the enterprise and should be a priority in any organization. Recent research shows that 75% of internet attacks are done at web application level. Web application security scanners ensure website security by automatically checking for SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other vulnerabilities. There are […]
23 Apr 2008
A twelve-year-old can build a nice Web application using the tools that came standard with any Linux or Windows machine. Thus it is worth asking ourselves, “What is challenging, interesting, and inspiring about Web-based applications?” This textbook written by Eve Andersson, Philip Greenspun, and Andrew Grumet for the MIT course “Software Engineering for Internet Applications”, […]
14 Apr 2008
One of my favourites ZendCon sessions, presented by Shahar Evron: “Building Scalable Development Environments”. Related links: Slides (PDF) Podcast (MP3)
10 Apr 2008
The first in a two-part series that appeared in The Rational Edge, this article presents a case study that analyses the requirements captured in use cases and transforms them into implementable representations that can be directly coded. An excellent article written by Gary Evans. Getting from use cases to code: Part 1: Use-Case Analysis Getting […]
6 Apr 2008
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both. Once again usability expert Jakob Nielsen writes about common mistakes made by designers, front-end developers and information architects when designing user interfaces. Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes
31 Mar 2008
Varien, one of the most important eCommerce development and consulting firms in the world, has taken eCommerce to a completely different level with the latest release of Magento 1.0. An amazing, flexible, modular and scalable open-source eCommerce solution, powered by one of the most popular systems on the web today, the Zend Framework. Congratulations to […]
15 Mar 2008
Is your code easy to change? Can you get nearly instantaneous feedback when you do change it? Do you understand it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have legacy code, and it is draining time and money away from your development efforts. In the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code, […]
13 Mar 2008
A couple of months ago I wrote a Dependency Injection component for the Zend Framework. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem: removing hidden dependencies and injecting mocked objects. The component has evolved quite a bit since I first created it, and it’s now part of a bigger system, where objects are persistent, can […]
11 Mar 2008
What’s a Web Cache? Why do people use them? A Web cache sits between one or more Web servers (also known as origin servers) and a client or many clients, and watches requests come by, saving copies of the responses, like HTML pages, images and files (collectively known as representations), for itself. Then, if there […]
Agile development methodologies have been around for a while now, and the list of them is long. It includes: Extreme Programmin (XP): Developed by Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, and Ron Jeffries, XP is probably the best-known lightweight methodology. With its roots in the Smalltalk community, it is a relatively complex system of practices, and Highsmith […]
8 Mar 2008
MediaWiki is a great PHP-based Wiki application that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia itself. One of MediaWiki strengths is how easy it is to extend with its plug-in architecture. The following is a list of 20 extensions that should make your life easier and save you a fair bit of time. Check […]
29 Feb 2008
MediaWiki is definitely one of the most widely used and best known Wikis out there, it powers Wikipedia.com, but I’m sure you already knew that. I’ve been using it at work to record and document all our internal systems and projects. It’s a great tool, it allows developers and projects managers to collaborate, provide and […]
17 Nov 2007
According to Marcus Baker, if you are a PHP developer and new to OOP, it’s possible that your story will go something like this: You’ll learn the syntax and build an object or two. You’ll try it in a live project. You will realise that you are getting no real advantage, and you’ll post your […]
12 Nov 2007
Times arise where a class (One) is supposed to do everything another class (Two) does and more. The preliminary temptation would be for class One to extend class Two , and thereby inheriting all of its functionality. However, there are times when this is the wrong thing to do, either because there isn’t a clear […]
9 Nov 2007
For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace. Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages! O’Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages (PDF: 701K), which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline.
26 Oct 2007
Today I came across an interesting post written by Troels Knak-Nielsen. We all know that patterns are not perfect in all situations and the Registry pattern is no exception. Here is what Troels has to say about this: The Registry Pattern – By Troels Knak-Nielsen The task, that a registry aims to solve, is to […]
18 Jul 2007
SoapUI is a free and open source desktop application for inspecting, invoking, developing, simulating/mocking and functional/load/compliance testing of web services over HTTP. It is mainly aimed at developers providing and/or consuming web services. Functional and Load-Testing can be done both interactively in soapUI or within an automated build/integration process using the soapUI command-line tools. Mock […]