I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it.Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird.I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppose there's also the whole node thing, in which you write things in Javascript and run them server-side with v8. ...

In modern web development, it’s standard practice to make use of a database abstraction layer, typically an Object-Relational Mapper based on either the Active Record pattern or the Data Mapper pattern. There are several pros and cons to this which are fairly well established, so I’ll spare us all from enumerating them all right now.One established pro worth mentioning is that these systems typically provide a high level interface for fetching data, often removing the need to ‘hand write’ SQL for anything but the most complex of query.As good as this sounds it h...

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, weâ€...

As the list of *-as-a-service’s continues to grow, I thought I’d throw one into the mix. What about the idea of a backend-as-a-service (BaaS)?The recent surge of client side Javascript frameworks along with the attractiveness of simple RESTful APIs has created an environment where server-side interaction can be reduced to simply database interaction (including validation and some computation). But why stop there?What if the server-side of the equation was simply a RESTful, schema-less API? It could utilize MongoDB or some other document-oriented storage to avoid a strict schema d...

Remember those childhood games where you are given two nearly identical images and your objective was to find some number of subtle differences? Well, I shouldn't have to play that game when I'm using your damn website.I show here two examples of a common practice that is plaguing the modern web. First, a clipping from a project page on github.com.  And now the second image:  See the difference? My question is this: why? That edit button is the only component of the entire page that has a hide-by-default-unless-your-mouse-is-in-a-certain-vertical-and-horizontal-range behavi...

“My hope for 2012 is that some of the old guard of well-respected web gurus stop talking HTML and CSS and start talking serious development. I love the way many of the old guard write and evangelize, but I’m tired of discussing basically the same stuff we were in 2006.”I wasn’t specifically referring to Jeffrey Zeldman, but he (somewhat arrogantly) assumed I was, and responded with a sarcastic, “And a merry Christmas to you, sir.” And while I wasn’t thinking of Zeldman and his books, conferences, and magazi...

Right now, there’s a mathematical symphony happening on your website.Every single one of your readers is subconsciously aware of this symphony, and more important, they are all pre-programmed to respond to it in a particular way.The question is this:Is your site’s symphony pleasing and inviting to your readers, or does it turn them off and make it harder to communicate with them? The Mathematical Symphony of TypographyAs it turns out, this symphony is not unique to websites. You “hear” it every time you read a book, newspaper, magazine, or web site—every place ...

There’s no denying it. I’m just to damn lazy to be an HTML developer. This really sunk in when I looked at a tutorial for doing a jQuery Lightbox – for a client project. The tutorial was titled “Super Simple Lightbox with CSS and jQuery” but after reading it over I thought a better title would be “A really freaking hard tutorial on the inane intricacies of doing something that looks simple but in reality is a skein of HTML, Javascript and CSS that no one except an HTML Jedi Master could every come up with “.I must say that I have a totally refreshed...