December 2012
November 2012
Stop Designing for “Users”
Activity-Centered Design (ACD) focuses on the activity context in which individuals interact with your product. Instead of analyzing specific goals and tasks, ACD focuses on the analysis of meaningful, goal-directed actions supported by tools and artifacts in a social world
October 2012
September 2012
June 2012
Network programming with Go
An e-book on building network applications using the Google Go programming language (golang)
PostgreSQL when it is not your job
Just open a postgresql configuration file. Your first impression will be “this looks like the dashboard of an ancient boeing 747” and “we’re all going to die”. 500 options and knobs you can twist.
May 2012
Quotes about programming languages
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare. Computing professor, implemented Algol 60, searcher at Microsoft Research.
April 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
Usability of Programming Languages
A programming language is essentially a means of communicating between humans and computers. Traditional computer science research has studied the machine end of the communications link at great length, but there is a shortage of knowledge and research methods for understanding the human end of the link.
A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency
This tutorial is a practical exploration of using Python coroutines (extended generators) for solving problems in data processing, event handling, and concurrent programming. The material starts off with generators and builds to writing a complete multitasking environment that can run thousands of concurrent tasks without using threads or using code based on event-driven callbacks (i.e., the "reactor" model)
“Mobile first” CSS and getting Sass to help with legacy IE
Taking a “mobile first” approach to web development poses some challenges if you need to provide a “desktop” experience for legacy versions of IE. Using a CSS pre-processor like Sass can help.
November 2011
May 2011
Holmes The CSS Markup Detective
Holmes is stand-alone diagnostic CSS stylesheet that can highlight potentially invalid, inaccessible or erroneous HTML(5) markup by adding one class.
Font sizing with rem
by 4 othersWhat do we do for browsers that don't support rem units? We can specify the fall-back using px, if you don't mind users of older versions of Internet Explorer still being unable to resize the text (well, there's still page zoom in IE7 and IE8). To do so, we specify the font-size using px units first and then define it again using rem units.
html { font-size: 62.5%; } body { font-size: 14px; font-size: 1.4rem; } /* =14px */ h1 { font-size: 24px; font-size: 2.4rem; } /* =24px */