The Coding Humanist

This is Jonathan. He’s my son and he’s nine years old. He also happens to have a severe allergy to milk. I have a story to tell you about him. If you have a friend or family member with food allergies, I also have something important to share. Something they might find life-changing.

As it turns out, I clearly need to spend more time dealing with .NET’s unique version of “dll hell” because this really bit me. A couple of weeks ago I installed the .NET 4.5 framework on my server. This server hosts almost all of my websites, my brother’s and a couple sites of a friend of mine. In theory, this should have been fine. In reality, it caused major problems.

So I’m a mobile guy (with a focus on mobile web). As a mobile guy, I prefer when people make statements that inform the public rather than confuse them. And since there are not enough opinions on the Internet, I figured I would post some thoughts (and these are my thoughts, not those of my employer). The other day an oft-retweeted comment by Mark Zuckerberg came out that needs some serious nuance and most definitely confuses more than it does inform. He said this:

I did some messing around with the ASP.NET Web Api this weekend and noticed what I think is a usability flaw in how they built the Api. Figured I would spell things out and see if anyone has any thoughts. And I do have a solution, though some will think the cure is worse than the disease.

aspconf is next week. aspconf is a new thing, yet an old thing. Hang around and I'll tell you a bit about it. A few years ago we started c4mvc and there was much rejoicing. The video sharing time we spent was fruitful. People liked it and so did we.

In my last post I described a basic JavaScript module pattern and how you can use it to tidy up your global scope. But it is now time to make it real, yo. Example time! You can view the demo page here.

Big JavaScript files, who likes them? Not me. For a while I had a real problem with them (as many do) but I have found a way to avoid the problem (not that these ideas are all original). And I am very happy to have this problem solved. We are using these ideas at work and I figured I would share what we have been doing that has worked really well. Later I'll share some things that haven't, which some of you may find even more beneficial.

So you know how to use the viewport meta tag to control some things about how mobile browsers render your page, you know about media queries and how you can use them to tweak your css for different sizes of monitors, and you know about progressive enhancement, and that everything doesn't actually have to look the same on every browser. Now let's get very practical. Let's say you want to build a website that will work for both desktop and mobile. You can do this easily in some circumstances but in others it can be a harder task. Here are some questions to ask yourself.

Over the last few months the Dallas Node.js meetup has been pretty spotty attendance-wise. Actually, it just hasn’t been happening. It is time for that to change.

Let’s talk about mobile web development some more! The principle of progressive enhancement is a general principle of front-end web development with wide applicability. Because you have a wide range of capabilities in mobile browsers, the principle is very important in this space as well.