Developing Upwards

John McCarthy on AWS and APIs in 1962 via Patrick Collison

I took a dive into Flexbox layouts recently, and I'm blown away by how powerful, understandable, and flexible they are. This new at off layout options is so fabulous to use, it feels like you aren't even writing CSS (which historically deals with layouts so terribly that I couldn't even conceive of it being pleasant). In a minor tangent, I've got to wonder what affect this child have in our tooling. We don't have a great track record for CSS authoring tools, especially in terms of layout versus style. Could this change with the introduction of a clean, simple layout model our tools could actually present properly? I can definitely imagine a rich content editor utilizing the kind of controls already common over table layouts being applied to the flexible axes of this new scheme. We might, if we entertain the thought, finally be able to empower or non-condensing stingers to produce compliant CSS for the layouts they actually want in a system they can actually under...

The following is an excerpt from a press release between my employer and our partners at UNC and Duke on a new project: The web application development company  Caktus Group  has teamed up with researchers at the  UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases  and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens. This is my exciting new project and I'm hugely happy to be able to talk about it publicly! We've been hard at work in conjunction with our great partners at UNC and Duke, and its been a very rewarding project even so early in the lifecycle. I'm very confident about our success in really being able to help people, and really that  is the whole reason I want to build software in the first place. It has been a very rewarding project, and an amazing opportunity I've been given. As it happens, this is also our first mobile app. I've been doing a lot of resear...

When porting a chrome packaged app to a firefox packaged app you will need to do an inventory as to which chrome specific api’s you are using and create a level of abstraction around them, as the naming / capabilities of the api’s vary across the platforms. David Clarke did the great leg work breaking down the current differences between the Chrome App and Firefox OS APIs. This is a great resource for anyone building web apps today! Check it out today . I'd love to see this kept up to date somewhere.

One of my colleagues at Caktus Group, Mark, as written up one of the most useful tips for Django developers trying to make good test coverage easier to digest for you team. Test running time is often a barrier to getting teams to follow good testing practices. Now what if you are running a set of tests which are only using  SimpleTestCase  or the base  unittest.TestCase ? Then you don't really need the test database creation at all. Depending on the backend you are using, the number of tables you have and the number of tests you are running the database creation can take many times longer than running the test themselves. ...  we can skip the database creation/teardown. I recommend any Django developers taking a look at the very simple solution he's come up with , which I'm planning to absorb into all of my projects quickly.    

Plasmid is an in-browser database and I've been working on it for a few months, talked to many people about it, and finally reached a point where I can release an API stable version. There are two main components to Plasmid, developed separately. PlasmidJS is the in-browser database, based on the IndexedDB specification and supports recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. The second component is Plasmid Sync: a backend server that allows users to synchronize their in-browser databases between machines. I'm really excited about this and I hope to see what people can do with it. There are other projects like this around, most notably the excellent PouchDB project, but I think Plasmid has properties that make it a better fit for many needs. Download This release is PlasmidJS 0.2.0 and is available at Github and on the Plasmid GitHub page. 0.2.0 on Github 0.2.0 on the Website Jump Right In If you'd like to jump right in, check out ...

Pssst... You're reading this on my old blog. You should update your RSS reader for my new one ! I've been invited to attend what looks to be an amazing event, Edge Conference. Edge looked to be a different sort of conference, and I'm excited to see how it works. Edge is about everyone learning from everyone else, so you need to bring something to teach as well as a desire to learn. Every moment of the conference will be publicly available afterward. I hope that I can bring something to the discussion, and I feel that if I don't try to do so, I'm not getting as much as I could out of this. The format of Edge encourages and depends on it, in fact. We open each hour long session with a ten minute talk. After that, we’re into the discussion, and we keep it moving fast. We record everything, on video and in text. Everything is released for free to the world the moment the event ends. While I hope I'll be able to get in my two cents to wha...