April 17, 2014 in Learn
Do You Really Need a Computer Science Degree?
(Options beyond a degree are important. Flickr photo by Faruk Ateş) Most electronic devices use software and most businesses are backed with software, whether on computers or in the cloud. All this requires software and web development. The good news for…
April 16, 2014 in Learn
Designer Meng To’s Writing Adventure Stemmed from Denied Visa
In 2013, Meng To was enjoying the startup life in Silicon Valley while lending his web design talents to Heyzap, a mobile game developer. Until his request for a new visa was denied. The Cambodian-born web designer and developer from…
April 15, 2014 in Learn
Moonlighting as a Designer or Developer: Money, Flexibility — and Some Caution
(The moon. Flickr photo by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel) When Neil Tortorella started his web design business, he already had a full-time job. “I was working for a newspaper doing ad stuff for them and freelancing nights and weekends,” says Tortorella,…
April 14, 2014 in Learn
The Beginner’s Guide to Ratchet: a Mobile Web App Framework
Ratchet is a front-end framework for building mobile web apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ratchet 2.0 was recently released, so it’s a good time to start learning how to build Ratchet apps. If you just want to see Ratchet in…
April 10, 2014 in Learn
How to Create Smoother Animations and Transitions in the Browser
In order to achieve smooth transitions and animations, a browser needs to avoid doing extra work on its main thread, the part that’s in charge of handling tasks like JavaScript, style calculations, layout, painting and compositing (more on these later)….
April 8, 2014 in Learn
How I Rapidly Prototype Websites
(Photo by Andrés Nieto Porras/Flickr) Treehouse students will often ask me which mockup tool I use to prototype websites, and my response is almost always the same: pencil and paper. I feel like when I give this answer, there’s a small…
April 3, 2014 in Learn
How to Evaluate Front-End Code for Inefficiencies
There’s more to writing good front-end code than knowing every HTML tag, CSS selector, or the latest front-end features and techniques. And as I mentioned in a recent blog post, writing good code takes a lot of patience and practice….
March 27, 2014 in Learn
How Data URIs Speed Improve Website Speed
As our websites grow more complex, web performance is becoming an increasingly important topic. There are many different strategies that you can employ to improve the performance of your websites. These include optimising images, combining multiple CSS files, or setting…
March 25, 2014 in Learn
Building HTML5 Context Menus
A lesser known feature of the HTML5 specification is context menus. These allow you to add custom items to the menu that appears when a user right-clicks on the page. Using JavaScript, you can then control the actions these items…
March 21, 2014 in Learn
An Introduction to HTML Imports
HTML imports is an exciting technology that promises to change how we build websites. Imports allow you to include HTML documents within other HTML documents. This has a number of benefits, including the ability to create a bundle of HTML,…
March 19, 2014 in Learn
Exploring the JavaScript Device APIs
Photograph by Jeremy Keith (adactio) The mobile revolution has completely changed how people access the web. It’s only natural then that the web should evolve to better suit the plethora of devices on which it’s now accessed. When the web…
March 18, 2014 in Learn
Gamepad Controls for HTML5 Games
HTML5 games still have a lot of promises to fulfill, but the W3C gamepad specification is a great example of something that’s going well. The spec is still a working draft, but the prospect of reading game controller data in…