Author
I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, I'm an Englishman in Portland. All of my professional life I've worked with computers online. I'm a polyglot programmer and like using the right tools for the job. In my spare time I enjoy spending time with my young family and when I get chance, sticking opponents in Halo 4. You can find me in most places @chalkers.
April 5, 2017 in Treehouse News
Treehouse has teamed up with Amazon to teach developers and non-developers to build Alexa skills. The course, Build an Alexa Skill, has been released today! What is Alexa? Alexa is a voice service from Amazon that powers devices like the…
February 1, 2016 in Learn
Heroku is a hosting platform where you can deploy dynamic applications in Rails, PHP, Node.js and Python web applications. Prerequisites In order to deploy a site you need a couple of things: Have git installed Heroku Account – sign up…
October 29, 2015 in Learn
To understand the nuances of what it means to be a developer or a designer let’s take a walk down memory lane and end with where we’re at today. A Little Bit of History When I started dabbling with HTML…
October 8, 2015 in Learn
Humans, with our big brains, are built for one thing: learning. Having a brain like ours allows us to survive and adapt to many environments, including hostile ones. We’ve been to the depths of the ocean and to the surface…
September 14, 2015 in Learn
I’ve spoken previously on how to land your first job in the industry. All the advice still stands. The comments over there are great to look at too. This time, I’m talking about the expectations you need when going to…
August 18, 2015 in Learn
I haven’t been so excited since the early days of jQuery. React is a JavaScript library initially developed by Instagram/Facebook for building user interfaces. Since it has received a lot of attention recently with companies like Netflix, Walmart, Tesco, Airbnb…
August 10, 2015 in Learn
A task is something you need to do. If you want to perform that task over and over again, as you do in development, you’ll save yourself a lot of time if you automate the process. Common web development tasks include…
July 20, 2015 in Learn
“So I’m allowed to cheat?” Shocked and confused, this is what my wife, Lauren, asked me late last year. Earlier that day she told me she’d like to code. I thought this would be an amazing opportunity for me as…
July 14, 2015 in Learn
Have you ever wanted a way to update all file download links on your site to have the behavior of opening a new browser window? This is a better user flow than having the user follow the link and then…
July 8, 2015 in Learn
What is npm? npm is a package manager for JavaScript. It manages dependencies for both front-end and back-end projects. If you’re a company wanting to distribute a way for developers to connect to your service or an open-source developer who…
June 30, 2015 in Learn
Back in May I shared how to load images asynchronously with JavaScript. I had a lot of requests from people on how to do it in jQuery. So here we go! Asynchronous Image Loading Instead of having images load like…
June 24, 2015 in Learn
ECMAScript 6 is out! I covered what ECMAScript is and the new and improved syntax in this post here. But the syntax is not the only change you’ll see in ECMAScript, there are new types too – the most useful…