HTML All The Things &#8211; Web Development, Web Design, Small Business

When to Start

10 april 2019 | 86 min

In this episode Matt and Mike discuss when to start your business, a project, or whatever it is you're putting off. It's easy to get bogged down, luckily there are some tips and tricks to prevent it.

Segment 1 - When to Start

One of the things you’ll hear as an entrepreneur, and we’ve mentioned on the show several times is to “just start”
This means that instead of being bogged down by “what ifs” that you should just jump in and get started on whatever it is you’re working on
A prime example: a would-be entrepreneur gets stuck reading into the basics of how to start a business, what pitfalls could happen, what issues may occur, etc.
- While it’s good to be prepared, you could read for years upon years and still have things to flip through. It’s generally better to understand the basics, do your best to cover all the bases that you need to and then just start - avoiding the paranoia of reading all the laws and issues that others have fallen into in the past. Definitely read and understand these things, but there is a point where you’ve read enough and it’s time to take action, there’s no way you can cover every base all the time or else you’ll never get started
- Keep in mind that being cautious isn’t a bad thing either, if you think you need to check a law or regulation out before doing something, then it’s best to check to ensure you’re operating legally. Just don’t get bogged down for years without acting, or your competition will fly by you. If you need to, get a lawyer to explain things to you in everyday terms so you can move forward with peace of mind
Now that, that’s out of the way and you’re ready to get programming your new app, website, or whatever other program you’re working on, you’re bound to hit another wall - the learning curve
Unless you’re experienced in everything your project needs, you’ll end up hitting a lot of walls, maybe you don’t even know where to start and this is another major point of contention that people get stuck in.
Let’s say you want to make a PWA and you’re not experienced at all with service workers - a situation we recently found ourselves in - you could read example after example, look at tons of different solutions, try different plugins and even try different programming languages but at the end of the day you’re just reading up on what you want to be doing, you’re not doing what you want to be doing.
Obviously guides, tutorials, and research do go a long way and are very valuable, but it’s easy to get stuck reading through the plethora of different ways that you can implement a solution for your given app and if it’s a passion project you want to make sure you’re using the best solution so you keep looking through different options and never actually start making that service worker (in our example)
This is another major area where you need to “just start”
The time differs from person to person, and from project to project, but at the end of the day you need/want to make that deliverable and we’re all human so it’s not going to be perfect (especially if you’re a beginner), so read up enough so you can navigate Google searches on that thing you’re working on and then just start making it
If you end up pivoting a few times, who cares, as long as you keep moving towards the goal - you’ll end up learning way more working on the solution rather than just reading about it
As a I said above the “just start” point is different for each person, and furthermore per project - in the next two segments we’ll be discussing our differing approaches to this problem

Segment 2 - Matt’s Process

When we first started our business, we had a hard time trying to figure out exactly what we needed to do
We weren’t sure whether you needed a lawyer, or if you had to declare your business somewhere - there was nothing of the sort covered in our schooling other than the different types of businesses like partnerships, corporations, etc.
We ended up calling a few places that didn’t get back to us, so we ended up having a meeting with a lawyer which gave us some information on opening, what at the time, was an IT business
From that though, we decided that we wanted to go into web development due to an opportunity that popped up and from that pivot we ended up finding a business advisor that took us through the procedure, which ended up being very easy to get started
We’ve mentioned this origin story in a past episode, but it’s an example of how we got bogged down in the beginning, but kept pushing through and then eventually just got started - later than we wanted - but we still finally got the job done
In terms of a web development project, one of the more recent examples that we’ve mentioned on that show was learning about service workers, which resulted in getting bogged down in the research - my procedure for this was:
- Google “service workers” and read up on the very basics, learn how they work and how to implement them at a very high level so I know what tools I’ll need to have at my disposal
- Unfortunately, since service workers are complex and I was completely new to them, I had to read up on some related topics like promises and JS workers which gave me a bit of useful background information - and then I had to figure out how to get service workers to work with VueJS (this entire story is in this episode:)
- Dealing with advanced/complex topics are particularly easy to get bogged down in because there are a lot of variables that you, as a beginner, will not be aware of and will be tempted to read up on, leading to the loop of constant research
- In order to get out of the particular situation, I started narrowing the research from the initial very general searches, down to my particular situation of using service workers with vuejs
- That type of more specific research led me to a few examples that I was able to implement into my testing, which eventually led us to the solution that we’re working on now
One of the telltale signs that I’ve read too much is that I have bookmarks/resources that have a lot of overlapping information. If I find myself bookmarking a variety of resources that essentially “read in circles” or are covering the exact same topics but in slightly different ways, I’ll generally stop researching and start implementing on the spot

Segment 3 - Mike’s Process

Feasibility assessment

Can the chosen technology; plugin, library, framework, etc. Accomplish the set current and future goals of the application
PWA example, simple buying app for a company that needs to work on all platforms

Learning curve

With my current knowledge, how long will it take me to
- Get started with this
- Accomplish my desired functionality
- Optimize for performance and extensibility
PWA is standard html css js with a small jump in complexity in reference to service workers

Get started

Dive right into starting to use it, even if it’s just setting it up and running it’s most basic function
- I.e making a hello world application
Create a PWA of the current products site

More research

Now that you have a basic understanding you can dive deeper into learning
Watch videos, read tutorials, what ever learning style works for you
Always do these with a goal, for instance trying to implement a feature on your roadmap, so that you are
- More motivated
- Not wasting any time
Try to implement what you’re learning in parallel to learning about it
In terms of PWA add offline functionality to app with service workers

Web News - Apple

Our main OS is Windows
Had to buy a macbook to compile iOS apps using cordova and debug safari on an iPad
Initially bought a 2011 13 inch macbook pro
- Did the job but was pretty slow even with a upgraded HDD to SSD
- Not enough screen real estate to use as a main machine if I’m traveling
- Also it does not officially support MacOS Mojave and the new xcode. Which means I wasn’t able to test my iOS apps on my updated iPad air 2
Bought a late 2013 15” macbook pro Retina which solved all those problems, but as I found out, Macbooks don’t have the greatest quality control and always have some weird issues
Issue I had was a system process called kernel_task was taking up over 500% of the CPU processing threads and making my macbook pretty much unusable. This would usually happen when my Mac was at 100% battery and connected to power.
A battery recalibration seemed to fix it but the Macbook still seems a little slow for it’s specs. Makes me think CPU is power throttling (def not temperature issues as they are fine)
Had some moments where I didn’t know what to do, I don’t really want to buy a new Macbook having heard all it’s display and keyboard problems, especially considering it’s well over 3000 Canadian
Really sucks when a manufacturer closes everything down and doesn’t give you any real options, not being able to do an iOS development on a windows or even linux machine locks me into only one option which hasn’t been a very good experience
Considered building a hackintosh but again I need it to be potentially portable
Wish I had the option of buying a windows laptop and running Macos on it, or being able to debug/compile in windows or even linux
Don’t have any huge problems with MacOS as a whole, has its ups and downs like with any OS/ecosystem but the hardware has me really concerned
- Not being able to upgrade pretty much anything in the newer macbooks
- Having higher than industry standard failure rates on ‘premium’ priced machines
- Not having enough hardware options in the different models (especially at reasonable prices)
Apple PWA and Webview support is also a disaster
What should I do?
Do you have hope for the future of Macbooks?

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Progressive Web Apps

3 april 2019 | 82 min

In this episode we'll be discussing the ins and outs of progressive web apps including what they are, some of their functionality, and what challenges/limitations they still face.

Segment 1 - What is a PWA

As mentioned on the show a few times before, PWA stands for Progressive Web App, which is the evolution of the standard web app
If you’re new to all of this, the breakdown is rather simple:
- Website - A website is a more basic presence on the web, it delivers content to a visitor (ie blog posts, news articles) Popular examples would be news websites, tech blogs, marketing websites, and small business sites.
- Web App - Functions similarly to a website, however, acts more like an app that you’d see on your phone that performs a function. For example, there are online image editors where you can upload your photo and edit it right in the browser. This editor is a web app because the user interacts with it and computing happens (via the photo edits), content isn’t being delivered in the same way as a written article, or marketing information to the user. Unlike apps that run on your phone however, web apps are limited by the browsers limitations meaning that natively they can’t be installed, and they generally don’t have access to certain functions that natively installed apps can take advantage of, usually due to permissions/security on a given device.
- Progressive Web App - PWAs are the natural evolution of the standard web app, whose arguably biggest feature is the ability to run offline through the usage of service workers. Basically, they’re a web app that runs in the browser like any other, however, they can be installed and start leveraging more of those features that natively installed Android apps can . They’re still limited by the same restraints you can see from other webview apps and they still run the same codebase as their web app counterparts, not the native Java like other Android apps. In addition, they aren’t in a centralized location like the apps found in the Google Play store, you generally have to grab them from the web app’s website. If you visit the Twitter web app from your Chrome browser on Android you’ll see an “Add to Home Screen” button, if you do that you’re installing the Twitter PWA, but if you look up Twitter in the Google Play Store that’s a different native app
PWAs are getting more and more powerful and a lot of the walled off features are being broken down. Just a few short years ago you couldn’t get push notifications from your browser, now they’re rather commonplace for chat and news sites.
Accessing hardware was also an issue years ago, getting access to things like a webcam or a microphone, but now you can use a chat app like Skype right in the browser via video or voice chat - these limitations are quickly being done away with. Things like NFC access, however, is still a limitation last time I checked.
In terms of accessing PWAs, as mentioned before, there isn’t a centralized location for them all. Unlike on Android where the Google Play Store houses the vast majority of the available native apps, PWAs are generally downloaded from the web app’s website. However, even this limitation is starting to change with new ways to list PWAs in both the Google Play Store and Microsoft Store starting to make their way into the developer toolbelt
With these restrictions breaking down the main limitation is really with the codebase. Since a PWA isn’t written in the native language of a given platform, but rather runs more like a website/web app, Javascript does come with some limitations namely that it is a single-threaded process. However, there are workarounds for this, and Javascript itself is becoming more user friendly and more functional with every release - just like PWAs
From my experience, iOS has “less adopted” PWAs as of right now, however, I can see that limitation being lifted at some point in the near future in my opinion. One example would be that No BS News for Reddit can be installed on Android phones in it’s demo form right now, but that’s not the case on an iPhone. However, the app does still function in the browser which shows off the versatility of a PWA
Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of corporations will have strict policies on what they support. For example, some places may say that if a certain browser’s usage worldwide is above 2% then that browser must be supported. This creates a problem because oftentimes it’s an older version of a browser like Internet Explorer, and since PWAs are so new, there will be severe limitations on what a developer can do if he needs features to work on such old software
In conclusion, a PWA is the evolution of the standard web app. It runs in the browser like any other website/web app, but has additional features like offline functionality and the ability to be installed. PWAs are quickly approaching the functionality of standard native apps, which is good news for small developer teams that have a web app and no time to develop a completely different native app for smartphones. The real question is whether PWAs will take over native apps, or will they just be another option for developers?
Here are a couple links comparing and contrasting PWA functionality vs native app functionality

Segment 2 - Make your Web App a PWA

Quite a simple process if your application doesn’t make any external api calls
Just need a manifest json file that gives browser information such as app names and icon locations
Web app must be served with HTTPS and have a basic service worker
What that essentially accomplishes is allowing supported browsers/operating systems to detect your app as a PWA and cache it to be served from cache instead of the network.
The power of PWA’s really comes with the service worker implementation.
- With service workers we create cached server calls, so if you hit a external API or your own servers API the service worker can cache them and then serve the responses from the cache instead of the network API calls.
- You can also set up the service worker to detect changes and update the caches with those changes (this has caveats)
With vuejs specifically, the vue cli can be used to create a app with PWA functionality already built in or even add PWA functionality to an existing app
This creates all the files necessary for the browser to detect your website as a PWA
You’ll need to edit the information in your manifest file and add any functionality to your service worker you need other than what it already has built in which is
- Caching all css, js, img and html files that are in the application
Essentially this allows a PWA to run more like a native application in the sense that it doesn’t rely on the speed or presence of a network connection
The PWA landscape is always changing and evolving so features are constantly being worked on and usually added from browser to browser

Segment 3 - State of PWAs

Currently PWA’s are supported on every major browser to some extent. Chrome has the deepest integration and support for PWA’s
Some really cool features that chrome gives you is the ability to add a PWA to your desktop/home screen on all operating systems but iOS. So on Android and windows for instance if the application is a PWA you can go into the 3 dot menu in the top right corner and there will be an option to Install in there. This will add it to your application and for most purposes will behave just like a native application of that operating system.
Great use cases for this can be internal business logic apps, like if a company needs a application for their new employees to take a safety course it can be easily made as a PWA.
The large advantage of PWA’s to development teams is how quickly they can be built, deployed and tested across multiple platforms.
Only needing a small development team to launch a application is a huge advantage for small startups and businesses, as it allows for much quicker and agile development
The greatest benefit to users is the speed of the applications, since the application can be mostly served from cache the user won’t see as much loading going from page to page
There are of course some inconsistencies with PWA’s currently. iOS being the main one
On iOS most crucial features are supported, like service workers but with quite a few caveats
- No background syncing,
- no push notifications,
- no app theming
- No prompt to install from the browser
- and the major one is that service worker events are not supported. So we can’t get information such as new update available messaging
That was a huge challenge recently because one of the applications I’m currently being contracted to work on is a PWA that has to run on iPads. Not having a consistent update experience was a major problem for testing and deploying updates. There was a work around which involved setting a workbox (framework for creating service workers) option called skipwaiting to true, which essentially now checks for new updates on every single load and loads them right away.
- Disadvantage to this is a larger network call is made on every load unless no network is detected
PWA’s also use a slightly different renderer on iOS then safari and therefore has some minor inconsistencies that need to be QA’d and fixed
Thankfully most issues can be worked around and it still provides for a much better experience then the browser version
Resources:
- https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
- https://devchat.tv/views-on-vue/vov-055-progressive-web-apps-with-aaron-gustafson-live-at-microsoft-ignite/

Web News - Flagship Smartphone UX

The trend among smartphones for 2018/2019 are:
- Very tall, with an aspect ratio of something like 2:1
- Very high screen to body ratio - almost no bezels
- Have notches or cutouts in the screen to accommodate for front-facing cameras and sensors
These trends create a major set of UX/UI issues that affect web developers, app developers, and device manufacturers because they need to ensure that content is not being rendered right where a piece of the screen is missing, not to mention create some sort of elegant solution to allow the UI to “avoid” the notch or cutout without annoying the user
In addition, in recent years vertical video, photos, and portrait apps have been on the rise because phones are generally easier to hold in the portrait orientation, but since they’ve been getting taller and taller, it’s difficult for users to reach any UI elements at the top of the screen - especially with one hand
We’ve seen manufacturers try and combat this with various iterations of one-handed modes which generally shrink the screens, or with UI redesigns that makes UI elements favour the bottom of the screen
Gestures are starting to take off, allowing users to access the notification shade at the top of the screen by just swiping down anywhere on the home screen, among other innovative gesture functions
From this information there are a couple of UX issue that stand out to me
- Notches and cutouts are all different on different devices, and they are handled differently by different manufacturers
- The bottom of the screen is getting very crowded with things like the android nav bar, the chrome bar (depending on if you use that UI layout), and then navbars for touch interfaces on websites
- Gestures and UX workarounds for one-handed use are adding to the learning curve of devices that were once rather easy to use

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Refactoring

28 mars 2019 | 35 min

In this solo episode, Mike discusses the code refactoring process and then deep dives on work/life balance.

Segment 1 - What is Refactoring

Refactoring definition
- Changing your code to improve its organization and structure without directly influencing it’s performance
Explanation of terminology
- Code Smells
  - Something you notice as your coding that you think will later require a restructure/reorganization
- Extensibility
  - Ability to later down the road use your current code to extend the capabilities of your program without having to rewrite large portions of code
- Maintainability
  - Make it easier to fix bugs and find issues in your code down the line when you’re not as familiar with it
- Extraction/componentization
  - Taking functionality from a method and creating its own method so that it becomes reusable to other functions

Segment 2 - Tips

Refactor often
Create a refactor list
- When you notice a code smell but need to focus on functionality, jot it down in a refactor to do list so you don’t forget to go back and correct
Change obscure variable names to proper named variables (Maintainability)
- Also use appropriate variable types. In JS we are limited but we still have the choice between let, const, var
When you notice you’re using the same of similar functionality in multiple functions, externalize that functionality into its own function (extraction/componentization)
- That could be a seperate function, or it can be a seperate file with a it’s own class and extensible functionalities
- In vuejs currently you can used Mixins which allow the use of methods across components (in the future this will be handled with hooks)
Remove old code that you previously commented out
Clean up unused files, folders, functions and images
Change code to be extensible to your needs (Extensibility)
- During sprints with short deadlines sometimes you’ll write code to just get something working while realizing that certain functionality that needs to be implemented in the future won’t work with the current implementation
- Example: Internationalization
Remove unused libraries
- We all add libraries as we code to try to meet deadlines faster, but sometimes they don’t work the way we want and we move on to the next one. It’s important to remove them when we realise they don’t fit
Use tools like prettier and lint to help maintain code structure on a daily basis
- Example making sure everything is in spaces instead of tabs
- Arrow functions instead of expression functions
Add comments to sections of code you think need explanation (maintainability)

Web News - Work/Life Balance

One of the disadvantages of being a contractor/freelancer is not having that 9-5 work structure that you have to follow
Depending on your situation though it might be an advantage, if your wife works from home also, you can sometimes spend the best parts of the day together.
Instead of going shopping at peak times you can go earlier and just work when you get back
Take advantage of off hours for traffic
A structured day is great, but everyone has a different work rhythm and being able to structure your day based on that can greatly increase productivity.
- If you work better in the mornings and early evenings you can make the middle of the day your time off for instance
If your considering freelancing you have to be able to structure your own days, which seems simple but can really be a challenge.

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Advanced Topics w/ Little Experience

20 mars 2019 | 79 min

In this episode we take a look at taking on complex tasks in a field where you're not very experienced, something all programmers must do at one point or another in their career.

Segment 1 - The Newcomer Effect

This segment is going to focus on our experience configuring a vuejs service worker - I went in with no previous hand-on experience, a complete newcomer to service workers and an amateur at vuejs. Therefore this process is no doubt clunky, but as you’ll hear that’s exactly the point
I want to be clear before I dive in here that we’re using the following particular scenario because it was recent, we are not pointing the finger at any of the plugins, apps, or resources that we mention below. The issues we’re discussing are industry-wide, and not on a specific service, platform, or individual.
Recently we went to work with service workers on a Vue.js app (No BS News for Reddit)
As apart of the coding challenge we had already had a basic service worker setup that allowed the local assets to load when the app was offline
This functionality was made using a pwa plugin for vuejs
- We left this plugin mostly, if not completely, in its default configuration
- This default configuration registers a service worker and then generates a service worker file which caches those offline assets
- Mike got the project to this point during the coding challenge and then I took over
This is where things all fell apart for me:
- I had done a couple of days on reading basic service worker configurations and functionality and then finally decided to dive into our project
- First thing I did was look around the file structure and I find a file named registerServiceWorker.js
- This file contained an import line regarding register-service-worker (which fueled my initial Google searches) as well as the registration and basic responses that you’d expect such as successfully registered, detecting offline, etc.
- Searching register-service-worker led me to the page that I linked above, which had some very brief documentation and a code example that looked like our registerServiceWorker.js file (so far so good)
- From there I ran some tests in Chrome, checking for service worker install, checking offline mode, etc to get my bearings
- At that point I wanted to start adding some code of my own to the service worker, from my readings I knew that the service worker was definitely a separate file and from the registerServiceWorker.js file I could see that it was referring to a file called service-worker.js
- Searching the directory for said file revealed that it didn’t exist
- I then went and checked in the browser again, taking a look at the sources tab to find out what file was running the service worker, it showed that it was definitely service-worker.js - which indicated that the file was being created dynamically as apart of the build process
- This led us down a rabbit hole of finding how to inject my service worker code into this autogenerated file
- Overall, we eventually did find a solution for the code injection, however, it was not in the original register-service-worker documentation, nor was it discussed a lot on stack overflow
- We did find one Stack Overflow thread that did help, which led us to a useful blog and a couple of interesting links - I also found a separate page on npmjs.com somewhere along the lines which contained the missing code we were looking for
- Basically we needed to add some injection configuration into the vue.config.js file and then from there make our service worker script
Now I know that’s long winded, but it points out some very important problems/concerns:
- The newcomer effect is alive and well, I wrote an article on Medium about what I call the newcomer effect a long time ago, it basically means that any documents/signs/directions that are available for any given experience rarely take into account the needs of those that are complete beginners - increasing the entry “budget” for newbies
- I’m not sure how documentation writers do it - maybe it’s because they’ve been working on their projects for so long - that they completely miss major steps in their documentation. It’s got to be mentioned that we desperately need better documentation for beginners and furthermore, more linking between potentially helpful guides
- In this particular case, maybe it’s because many folks won’t write their own service worker, but rather just want the default to cache the local assets and that’s it, but shouldn’t it at least be mentioned that if you want to write your own service worker - please see x
- Toxicity and useless comments are alive and well - on various forum posts, comments, and of course Stack Overflow posts there are typically an abundance of comments that dismiss questions due to “user not being experienced enough” or similar reasons. Or questions that are marked as duplicates, when really the question was indeed unique enough to be answered
I want to be reiterate here, that I’m simply mentioning some of the roadblocks that we face when we’re newbies on a given topic, I’m sure a bunch of these affect other people as well. I’m not pointing the finger at this particular PWA plugin, Stack Overflow, npmjs.com, or any other website. I’m simply using this particular recent scenario to point out common problems that could be ironed out for those of us that are inexperienced. These problems can be found across any programming language, and even outside of the programming world in some cases.
In conclusion, once we got the service worker file running, we were off the races. We ended up being able to cache all our Google Fonts thanks to a helpful guide and are well on our way to getting more offline functionality added in the app. Once we had everything put together, the PWA plugin works great. But I stand by my position that finding instructions on how to setup something in Vue (or any other framework, library, or whatever you're using) shouldn't be the challenging part. The challenging part here should be that we need to get offline functionality working via our service worker itself, not figuring out how a service worker is setup in this particular configuration

Segment 2 - Strategies

Complicated issues and topics arise all the time during the the development of a project
They can range from concepts you haven't heard of like Binary Tree Searches or design patterns, advanced algorithms or even just complicated libraries/frameworks
Sometimes when taking on a task it might seem that there's just to many unknowns for you and you’re delving into a sea of advanced topics
I’m going to go through a couple ways I go about learning and implementing advanced topics.
I start by breaking them down into as many smaller topics as I can
For instance if the topic would be VueJs id break it down into
- Setup dev environment
- Create first hello world app
- Test reactivity
- Figure out navigation
- Figure out state sharing
- Learn about components
- Etc
By breaking apart a complicated topic into smaller manageable topics it takes away the initial feeling of being lost and allows you to focus on one small easy to digest topic at a time
If the topic is something that's hard to breakdown, or you don’t even know where to start breaking it down, it’s a good idea to take a look at the documentation and see what they start with. Usually the documentation starts with the simpler topics and moves on to the advanced ones. Of course if it has poor documentation that's a whole other problem that as Matt previously stated.
Once the topic has been broken down to learn more about each section I would actually start coding almost right away. So as you’re learning about how to get a dev environment setup, actually set it up.
The more I’m actually applying what I’m learning the faster I’ll pick up the concepts and find their downfalls and issues
Speaking of issues advanced topics can also just be hard to debug issues. We’ve had an episode about troubleshooting so I won’t go to far into it but essentially your first key goal is to be able to easily reproduce the issue, after that using the chrome dev tools as your guide, you can put breakpoints everywhere you need to read the state of all the variables as you progress. This method usually
- Diagnoses my issues quickly
- And gives me a clearer path for a simple solution
If you run into a roadblock and don’t see a solution at all, step away from that issue for some time. Even just getting up going to do a small chore might jog your brain into thinking about it from a different angle
Sometimes you’ll run into issues figuring out seemingly simple features and you might have to use these strategies for them too
Here's something that recently happened to me where I had to use all these strategies to get past a seemingly simple feature addition
- Get the best library to work in a basic way to my liking
- If it works figure out why it isn’t working in my particular scenario
- Reproduce the issue
- Troubleshoot the library code to figure out what is stopping it from working
- Fix the issue
- Had to add a comparison slider to a vuejs application
- A few libraries to choose from so thought it should be easy
- Tried all of them and they all had varying issues
- Issue arose here, had to figure a) should I use one of these libraries or build my own
- Broke down the problem
- During the process of fixing it, I had to step away a couple times and each time I found different ways

Web News - Thin Client Computing

With the announcement of Google’s new streaming game service Stadia it seems like a good time to have a quick look at the current state and the potential future of thin client computing
When referring to thin clients I mean a small, low power computer that essentially is used to remote connect to a offsite powerful one that provides greater performance then you can get with lightweight portable computers
In reference to Google’s new game streaming service a person can play AAA games using any device that is connected to the internet and runs chrome.
There's obvious advantages to this
- Using cheap hardware to still perform complex tasks
- Being able to access the same environment from any device without any sort of backups or syncing required
Some not so obvious advantages actually can come for developers
- If large thin client powerhouses like google become really popular, a developer is now coding for a single set of hardware, as the actual thin client that the user has doesn’t matter
- Imagine gaming developers not having to worry what video card their audience will have because everyone will just be using thin clients to connect to a large datacenter with the same hardware in each machine
The limitations are also pretty big right now. Network connection being the main one. The latency of your actions appearing on screen can be very distracting. If you click your mouse and only a second later something happens it makes working with the system very unpleasant.
But with the knowledge that networks are constantly improving, latency is also getting better and maybe there are ways to make it almost unnoticeable, can you see a future where thin computing explodes?

Links

Plugin Links
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/register-service-worker
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vue/cli-plugin-pwa/v/3.0.0-rc.1
Stack Overflow Thread
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51214220/vue-cli-3-how-to-use-the-official-pwa-plugin-service-worker
Guide we used
- https://levelup.gitconnected.com/vue-pwa-example-298a8ea953c9
The Newcomer Effect: A UX consideration (Medium article)
- https://blog.endpointmedia.co/the-newcomer-effect-a-ux-consideration-39889b6db077

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Leadership w/ Scott McCarthy

13 mars 2019 | 95 min

In this episode we sit down with leadership expert Scott McCarthy, to discuss leadership skills related to small business and independent entrepreneurs.

Segment 1 - Introduce Yourself Segment 2 - Starting Out

Do you think that leadership is more of a school-learned skill (note-taking, reading, etc.) or more of one that you learn by putting it into practice?
How closely would you relate self-discipline with leadership skills? Should you work on self-discipline before trying to lead others?
When entrepreneurs are first starting out, they’re generally alone, or with a small group of other company founders. This leaves them partially or completely isolated from leading other people, a skill they would need to develop should their company grow and hire employees down the road. What advice would you give to someone looking to up their leadership game, before they hire employees?
A common mentality for new entrepreneurs is to just dive in and figure things out when you get there, which could lead your business into disaster. What’s your opinion on this mentality? Should people prepare more before they dive in?
How tied up should leaders get in the details? Should staff worry about details and leaders focus more on the big picture? (ie setting a sales goal without having the intricate details of how to reach it)
Many people that are thinking of starting a business are looking to stash some money away from their day jobs so that they can slowly lower their hours to work on their business idea. Given that their day job is a different experience from their would-be business, how would these entrepreneurs transfer any leadership skills they’re learning on the daily, to their new business?

Segment 3 - Types of Leader

One of the things that I struggle with a lot, is trying to determine what kind of leader I want to be. I want to maximize my team’s output, but that the same time, I don’t want to be a “force to be reckoned with” when entering the office. I often flip between being a ruthless money-only kind of leader, a laid back “tech culture” leader, or something in between. Does this kind of decision naturally work itself out as you gain more management experience, or is it more dictated by the stage of the company? (ie only the richer companies can afford to be laid back)
How much, if at all, does the job dictate the type of leader needed?
Should leaders have “modes” that they snap into in certain situations? (ie Be really monetarily aggressive during an economic downturn, and lighten up when the business improves)

Web News - Difficult Situations

When faced with a difficult situation, having a strong leader is critical to guide the team through the storm.
This is easier said than done, however, because there are so many aspects of a business that a leader has to keep in mind
Things like: employees, asset management, capital, revenue, expenses, etc.
In an example scenario, let’s say that there is a struggling app development business that has 1 boss and 5 employees. The business is struggling to find customers and therefore can’t afford to pay their staff’s wages for any more than a couple of months.The company does have some valuable assets in the form of useful apps that could be put up for sale to raise capital. In this situation...
- How critical is employee loyalty? Should layoffs be step 1?
- Should assets be sold off before layoffs are considered?
- If layoffs are inevitable, how do leaders soften the blow? Or do they just move on?
- What is the main goal the leader should push for? (ie keeping the people employed, maximizing profit, liquidating to gain capital for themselves, retaining assets, etc.)

Scott's Links

Website w/ Social Links
- https://movingforwardleadership.com
Facebook Group
- https://movingforwardleadership.com/mastermind
Free eBook Preview of "The 9 Foundations of Leadership"
- https://movingforwardleadership.com/download
Email Scott for a free 15 minute coaching call
- scott@movingforwardleadership.com

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jQuery to Vue.js

6 mars 2019 | 69 min

With Vue.js' popularity steadily rising, many of you are probably thinking of migrating from jQuery.

Segment 1 - State of jQuery

https://jquery.com/
jQuery is a javascript library mainly targeted at HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation* and ajax requests.
Meant to simplify your code and reduce the amount you would have to write doing simple things such as
- Assigning event listeners to all elements of the same class
- Creating DOM elements such as DIVs
- Using the $.ajax shorthand to interact with API’s/server calls
So main theoretical advantages are
- Code becomes easier to read
- You write less code
- Familiarity, lots of developers have used jQuery for years and can write it without looking at documentation. Switching from something you are extremely familiar with can be a tough and costly venture
jQuery has now been around for over a decade (since 2006) and as with everything in our field, it has started to be seen as ‘ancient’ technology. I wouldn’t agree with that kind of labeling but having used jQuery for the better part of my web development career it does have some pitfalls
- Transitions and animation rendering isn’t well optimized and can lag
- Large transversal are often bulky and execution time lags in comparison to native Javascript solutions
- Javascript api’s have improved over the past decade to the point where it is easier to implement and has more features then a jquery solution
With the emergence of large javascript frameworks like React and Vue.js jquery has lost some ground as integrating with these frameworks, although possible, is usually viewed as resource costly and redundant

Segment 2 - From jQuery to Vue

As with anything new, it will take some time to adapt to a new way of developing when going from your typical jQuery workflow to a more framework based Vue.js workflow
There are key differences with how jQuery handles things vs the way Vue does. Examples of those differences:
- Assigning a function to DOM element such as a div or a button
  - In jQuery assigning a function is done in the script tag by using the $(‘.class or #id) selector and then extending it with a .click/.change(function(){dosomething;})
  - In Vue a dom/template element is tied to a method that is created in the vue instance. You can assign them to any event weather it be a click event or a change event using the @click, @change syntax on the dom element
- Transitions/Animations
  - jQuery has plenty of . extenders that handle simple transitions like fading in and out (.fadeIn .fadeOut) and most other simple animations. They can be activated within your js scripts on any element using the typical $ selectors. These do not use css animations or transitions and have notably worse performance then them
  - Vue has a tag that can then be tied to a css animation or transition. The transition can be activated on any state change, such as a simple v-if show hide
- Adding and removing classes conditionally/programmatically from DOM elements
  - jQuery can do this by using the $ selector to get all elements of a particular class, or just a single element with an ID. It can then using the .addClass or .removeClass extension to do either function
  - In Vue.js you have to bind classes to each element using the : notation. So on each element you need a conditional class, like a active class for a button, you assign the :class with a condition. Like active : isActive which binds the ‘active’ class to the isActive data property/variable. So anytime isActive is set to true, the element will gain the active class
There are many other differences, like Ajax requests, which are handled by the axios library in vuejs and dynamic DOM element creation which is a major feature of Vuejs but is considerably more janky using jQuery.
In the end making the transition from jQuery to Vue was quite hands on and involved a significant amount of adapting and learning new skills. Not to say it was overly difficult, as we’ve been saying many times in this podcast, having a good base knowledge of pure Javascript makes it easier to pick up new technologies and switch between libraries and frameworks.
My advice for developers just starting out would be to still get a good grasp of native javascript and then jump into a framework like Vue.js or React. With native javascript getting most of the features of jQuery, it doesn’t make sense for a developer to invest their time into learning it.

Useful Resource - Meta Tags

https://metatags.io/
MetaTags.io can help you investigate existing, modify, or create meta tags for your website, across multiple platforms
You’re able to type in a URL, which will pull in all the detected meta tags such as a photo, the title, and the description
From there you’re able to see exactly what your metadata will look like in Google as well as other popular services such as: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Slack
If there’s something you need to add or change, you can do that right on the web page. When you’re done, simply click on the “Generate Meta Tags” button and a new snippet of code containing your changes will be generated so you can paste them into your tags
Our use cases:
- We’ve been using this a lot with Webflow recently
- In Webflow you’re able to set site-wide meta tags, set static ones per page, dynamic ones based on CMS data, and even allow users to edit meta tags specifically via the Webflow CMS with some configuring
- Because there are so many options affecting meta tags, checking out the metadata in metatags.io really helps us inspect if the dynamic data is working out, or if the customers are filling things out correctly.
- It also lets us specifically test how metadata looks on all the customer’s preferred platforms all in one place (ie facebook, twitter)

Web News - Laser Focus in a Scatterbrained Industry

If you work for a big company, or listen to business gurus, “laser focus” is a commonly used phrase that has essentially become a buzzword of sorts
It’s generally used to describe the need for a team to focus on something important, such as a new project that’s coming up, or meeting a very important deadline
Often times it is also used to describe the general direction of a business, especially if a business is new, or is evolving with the times. The administration will generally ask for the staff to remain “laser focused” on their new movement, or business strategy to ensure continued success
This laser focus is also applied to beginner entrepreneurs when discussing the prospect of success. Gurus will often talk up working in their preferred industry, then bring it back down to earth saying things like “this is not a get rich quick thing, you need to stay laser focused on your goal to succeed, there’s no other way around it”
At the end of the day being laser focused on a goal is sound advice, but when it comes to complex projects, that laser focused goal has to be more general and can easily still lead you down the path to distraction and eventual failure
The website industry is all over the place when it comes to almost every single aspect.
Prices are wildly different from agency to agency for the exact same product
Building out projects take several different skill sets, or investments into services that essentially act as outsourced contractors (ie developing the site yourself and getting an SEO specialist involved to optimize for Google search)
Sometimes businesses don’t have any branding ready at all, which results in the need for illustrators and other related artists to make up logos and colour schemes
Don’t forget about the fact that websites are always online, so when they go down, someone needs to support them, pulling your attention away from new projects that you have on the go
When you’re starting out by yourself, or in a small team, you’ll inevitably have to become a jack of all trades in order to keep everything running smoothly, especially when you don’t have the capital to hire individuals to run each aspect of the business individually
Herein like the question, how do you remain laser focused when the industry you’re in is so scatterbrained?
One possible solution might be to make the goal more general, but if the goal is just to make money, there’s way too many solutions to that problem that will hardly result in laser focus of any kind.
We suffer from this issue constantly, we’ll say something like “let’s just focus on money the next few months” and before you know if we have 3 app concepts, some marketing plans for client-work, and nothing actually done. Even No BS News was completed for the purposes of the code challenge, but then not published further than that because another possible money making opportunity came knocking.
How do you remain focused in the web development/design industry?

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Pivoting a Project

27 februari 2019 | 69 min

Pivoting a project can be a blessing, or a curse. It's important to know when and when not to pivot to avoid derailing your development cycle.

Segment 1 - Our Pivots

When first starting out it’s important to be open to all avenues to you
- In our case we chose to try to get into the IT and Web Design/Development business from the get go.
- Although we did have a few IT clients we both seemed to prefer the web development side of the business as time went on.
- Eventually we landed a larger Web development account and at the same time had an opportunity to take on a medium size IT contract for a medical clinic.
- This was when we had to decide to go fully into web development or try to keep up both sides. It seemed like if we tried to keep both sides our preferable side would suffer so we chose to Pivot fully into web development
Recently we decided on another Pivot
- Our choices were continuing trying to expand our service industry and get more clients for a steadier income or try to build a audience and get more in touch with the developer community in an attempt to eventually generate a more ‘passive’ income source
- Of course if you’re listening to this podcast you know the route we chose, as HTML all the Things is our way of connecting with all of you
- This wasn’t an easy decision as the temptation of more stable income was high. I was engaged at the time (married now) and obviously with that was a little worried to dump a bunch of potential income for a chance at building a community
When we didn’t pivot
- Situations will constantly arise in your life, especially if you are trying to make your own path, that will tempt you to Pivot what you are doing
- Sometimes you will pivot, and sometimes it’s better to stick to your guns and forge ahead
- An example a time a we didn’t pivot was when we were coming up with project ideas and after launching our first html5 based game (Click to Riches) we wanted to create more games and almost become a html5 based gaming studio. This sounded really fun and we had a blast making Clicks to Riches but looking at it analytically the competition was extremely high and to generate any sort of consistent profit would have potentially taken years.

Segment 2 - Pivoting a Project

Generally when you’re first coming up with a project, you’ll list all the ideas, features, and systems that will be included either at release, or down the road
These features should be categorized into various groups, some of the common ones are:
- MVP - all the vital features that are needed to make the project function/solve the problem it’s out to solve
- First Updates - Some features that are close-to-vital or easy to implement and will be added to the project soon after release
- Wishlist - Features that would be “cool” to have in the project, but aren’t vital to it’s core functionality
Pivoting a project is not a decision to be taken lightly
Whenever you pivot a project’s direction, it almost always adds a bunch more work to the original plan, typically some of those wishlist features are bubbled up to the MVP, or first updates category
Pivoting at any stage of a project can have some terrible results:
- At the beginning - You might end up pivoting before or during the first days of development, which throws off the entire plan and can render any work done so far as completely useless
- Later on - Pivoting when a bunch of the work is completed can completely disrupt the development procedure and can ultimately derail a development cycle. For example, QA might not be able to test everything they want to because some of the features they were planning to test are now going to be radically changed. In addition, pivoting later into development often can result in added features that will be undercooked in the release, and therefore can produce a less quality product
On the flip side, sometimes pivoting can have some great results:
- Better product that is more fitted to the marketplace
- More features that were initially thought to be useless, but ended up being vital in some way
- Matching, or beating, a competitors offering where the original MVP wasn’t capable of doing so
Ultimately, pivoting is something that will come up on many projects, but you should be resistant to it
Ensure that the reasons for pivoting far outweigh the reasons for keeping the project the way it is
There is great value in sticking to a plan because people get familiar with it, and know what to expect. Changing said plan can result in chaos for the development team
We slightly pivoted No BS News due to Google Play’s new PWA application system that allows for PWAs to more easily be put onto the Google Play store. As a result of this change, we decided it best to have some offline features and to tie up any lose ends.
The benefits of pivoting No BS News in this way are:
- Better exposure and marketing on Google Play (discovery engine)
- More functionality will be added that will make it function more like a real app that relies on the internet, but caches some of the data it already has (minor offline functionality)
- Is going to push us to finish the project
- We need to learn service workers for some upcoming client work

Segment 3 - Pivotal Paralysis w/ the Jack of all Trades

As we’ve mentioned in brief before, it’s often very difficult to stay focused within the tech industry given that there are so many positions and so much crossover between them
When you’re running a small business, or a startup, often times you need to wear multiple hats within the company in order to keep it afloat
These multiple hats result in experience and exposure to several segments of the tech industry, that provide useful skills, but also provide a bunch of distractions
Whenever you have experience in a given area, it’s hard to focus on the one you’re working on.
For example - if you’re working on making the UI for an app, and you have Photoshop experience, you may get distracted for an entire day on editing some icons that weren’t in the project’s original schedule. Resulting in a late and possibly rushed UI development
Distractions aren’t great for a project’s development, but these distractions can easily evolve into project pivots.
If you’re developing an application that focuses on calculations, but you have experience in graphic design, you might be distracted from the original goal of making a simple UI that allows the user to complete calculations. Instead, you might pivot the project such that it has a theming system and a bunch of cool UI elements that look nice, but introduce a bunch of graphical and UI work that will stall out development and isn’t vital to the project
Being constantly distracted by things you have knowledge of is a constant plague of the tech industry because so many people have a experience in at least a few segments
It’s important to keep to the plan whenever you can to avoid scheduling mishaps, missed deadlines
Personally, I find this jack of all trades w/ pivoting issue normally crops up in the earlier parts of a project because everything is still being flushed out and designed. It’s so easy to just flip a wishlist feature into the MVP that before you know it, you have a bloated app that will arrive late and might not be tested as much as you’d like because it had to be rushed to try and meet the deadline
Stick to the plan whenever possible, but keep in mind that the plan isn’t written in stone, just really close to it. Make the plan hard to change - pivoting is a blessing and curse

Web News - Community Moderation

With the newest ‘Adpocalypse’ happening on YouTube due to all the ‘sexually illicit’ comments appearing on videos with underage kids in them, what does this mean for the future of platforms like YouTube or even the internet
From pretty much the beginning of the internet anytime a community has taken off it inevitably has pockets of illegal behavior in it.
Usually even thought he community does it’s best or at least something to monitor itself it gets blamed for its members doing something like this
- In YouTube's case it not only effects YouTube/google but all the creators on it. Most of which have done nothing wrong
Community moderation is pretty much impossible without limiting/censoring the community itself and therefore changing the product you are putting forward
- There are some small examples of good community moderation in my opinion, Reddit did a good job removing all of it’s child exploitation subreddits without destroying it’s community
The problem is not all websites or communities are as easily controlled as Reddit’s. And at some point we need to look at the problem as a whole
People will always find ways to post terrible/illegal content online. Who is it on to moderate this?
Once we go down the rabbit hole of severe moderation what will the internet look like?
If we are in the “wild west” of the internet days what civilized days are we approaching?

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Git Workflow

20 februari 2019 | 60 min

In this episode we talk about keeping our projects together with OneDrive and eventually upgrading to git for full version control.

Segment 1 - Starting Without Git

We used to use OneDrive to keep each other on the same page
We had the same OneDrive directory sync to our computers so that our work would carry over
However, this is not proper version control and therefore a bunch of conflicts would happen if we were working on the same projects, luckily most were minor and just required someone save their work again
This solution did work for us, however, and we used it for well over a year with only a few major sync issues - which is pretty good for a program that’s not meant for version control
To this day we still use OneDrive to keep some common files around, like graphical assets, however, our projects are not housed there anymore
Our experience with using OneDrive rather than a proper version control did show us that it is possible to get started working as a team, even without the “industry standard” tools (in this case git)
This is especially true if you work on projects yourself, or don’t touch any of the same files as another developer, so you can still have reliable file access across various computers while you learn how to use git

Segment 2 - Transition to Git

Working on your own is still a good time to learn and practice your Git skills. Even though it might seem like it’s slowing you down it really is just preparing you for the eventuality of working in a team environment and is something that is definitely going to come up during interviews and jobs
Learn the basics first
- Cloning - initial act of taking the repository from your git source to your local computer
- Pulling - taking the changes from the remote (git source) repository is updating your local repository
- Committing - This is an action that ties the current changes you’ve made in your local repository to a ‘commit’ object that you are able to label/message with references to the changes you’ve made
- Pushing - Taking all your local commits and transferring them (pushing them) to the git source repository
- Fetching - Updating your local git file with the current updates that are on the git repository (origin)
- Branches - A system where you can create ‘branches’ that are essentially copies of your repository. This allows you to develop code ‘risk-free’ without touching what is referred to as ‘master’ (master-copy). Usually branches are used for feature development, and best practice is to create a branch for each feature and once that feature i complete to close that branch
- Merges - This is a system in place to handle taking your current branch and merging it into another one (usually a master copy or a pre-defined integration branch). The trick here is to avoid working on the same portions of code in different branches as the merge will create a conflict that you will have to manually resolve
These base core concepts make up most of the functionality you’ll need to know to at least have a good base and be able to integrate easily into any companies workflow
- Sometimes learning specific workflow habits (like we’ll cover in segment 3) can pigeon hole you as almost every company has a different workflow and if you don’t understand the basic concepts it’ll be tougher to go from one workflow to another

Segment 3 - Workflow and Benefits

Recently we’ve begun working in larger teams and that has pushed us to develop a Workflow
This is just going to be a example of the one we developed. Other companies will use different approaches depending on project complexity, team size, technologies available, etc.
Our branch structure is as follow:
- No one codes in master, it is the production branch and only once the application is fully tested do we promote to master
- The main development branch is called dev-integration
  - Here is where everyone's feature and design branches will merge into for testing
- Every developer gets their own branch, usually just one at a time although there are a few exceptions if multiple large features are being worked on at once.
Once a developer feels like they have a good section of their feature is done and ready for testing they will create a pull request
- A pull request is a system within gits infrastructure to signify the attempt to merge branches
- Usually it’s easier to use your git service (bit bucket, github, gitlab) as they have a UI designed for this feature
- It allows the team to view all the changes that will take place during the merge, and gives them a chance to provide feedback in a thread style format
- Once approved, the lead developer can initiate the merge
- A developer does not need to initiate a pull request to merge dev-integration into their local branch as there are no consequences of that, they can just a do a git pull origin [branch name]
- Pull requests also provide a good history on your project, as long as the team names their requests appropriately you can look back easily to when a feature when merged in
Like I mentioned previously once everything is merged into dev-integration and thoroughly tested, a pull request can be opened into master. This will then be vetted by the senior developers/engineers on the project and merged, after which production deployment and dev ops can begin
This is of course just a snippet of the whole process and there is plenty of nuance that occurs, the more you work with git the more appreciation you have for it usually

Useful Resource - API Marketplace

https://rapidapi.com/
A lot of the time app ideas require an external source of information or some sort of off-app computing in order to provide a useful service
For example, a video game collection app isn't going to contain all the video games that have and will come out, otherwise the app would be enormous in size
Instead when you search for a game to add to your collection, the app will call upon an API which will generally search a massive database of video games alongside other goodies like cover art, release dates, etc.
Often times when people come up with an idea for an app, they'll back down from making it because their idea requires a lot of specific information, or needs some sort of machine learning involved.
Luckily there are a ton of APIs out there that can usually help out with these types of needs, allowing developers to finish up their apps without filling in massive databases, and learning very complex things like machine learning
Today's resource is an API marketplace called RapidAPI
I found RapidAPI, or more specifically Mashape, when I stumbled upon a Hearthstone API that linked to it
MaShape was acquired by RapidAPI a few years ago, so that's the correlation between them in case you're familiar with the MaShape brand over the RapidAPI one
RapidAPI contains tons of APIs in their marketplace that range from movie databases, to facial recognition
Each API has their own page that contains a bunch of useful information such as: popularity, average latency over the past 30 days, average success rate over the past 30 days.
- Plus more technical things such as how to access the API in a variety of methods like NodeJS, PHP, and more
- It also tells you whether the app is free, freemium, paid, etc.
- You can even test our the API right on the page

Web News - Multi-Device Workflow

Working across different devices is getting easier and easier whether you’re using the Chrome Extension that was just mentioned, using one of the Microsoft Office apps with the Microsoft Launcher (quickly open from “recent activities” in the mobile versions of the Office apps), messaging people in something like WhatsApp across the phone and desktop, etc.
Does this workflow open up new opportunities for progressive web apps that are responsive
- You could be working in a PWA on your PC and have your phone automatically sync with whatever you were working on, and open up right where you left off with just a tap
This sort of workflow also points towards a more unified OS future, whether that be with more integrations between OSs (ie Word on Mac), or actually consolidating different versions of operating systems (ChromeOS/Android)
Microsoft added a Chrome extension that allows Chrome to access the Windows timeline
With the use of the Microsoft launcher being able to pick up exactly where you left off on your comp is a major convenience

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Site Builders and Webflow

13 februari 2019 | 87 min

In this episode we discuss website builders in general, then do a deep dive into Webflow.

Segment 1 - Site Builders

There are many reasons out there to use a site builder, they can range anywhere from convenience aspects, to pricing.
I think it’s fairly important for a web developer to be at least familiar with these reasons and also the downfalls of site builders so that when it comes time for them to explain to their customer why they need a custom website, they will be coming at if from a place of knowledge and truth
First thing to get out of the way, some customers will actually benefit from a site builder over a custom website.
- People that can find a good template on a popular site builder that fits all* their needs right off the bat
- People that like to tinker but don’t have the time to learn a whole new skill like web development
- Someone just starting off with a bootstrap budget and a ton of time on their hands for their business
If you ever run into these people and they ask for advice on what they should do in terms of hiring a web design firm or doing it themselves, and they meet any of the specific categories above, you should definitely not hesitate to offer advice on using a site builder. Being honest with potential customers is key to earning trust, and maybe now they won’t be paying for your service but they will remember your advice and honesty when it comes time to update their site in the future
Now with that out of the way, with a lot of clients a site builder just won’t cut it.
- If a client brings up a site builder and shows you a template they found and like but then immediately says they want to change x, y, and z. That is a red flag that a site builder just won’t work for them. Changing anything on a site builder can be a huge hassle (sometimes possible) but a lot of the time will require some knowledge in web development anyway.
- If security is a huge concern some site builders should be avoided. We’ve had many issues with multiple clients getting hit at the same time with WordPress hacks. The disadvantage of using a large platform like some site builders is that if a hacker finds a way into one site, they find a way into all sites.
  - Shopify seems to be a fairly safe alternative for ecommerce as they treat security as a extremely high priority.
- If the client doesn’t have the time to completely manage their entire website
- If they need something very specific like integration into their customer database or their item database.
- If your customer thinks their business will grow quickly. Site builders are usually not designed to take on a huge influx of visitors and can have serious performance issues when that happens.
This leads us to something that can be seen a happy medium between a traditional site builder that usually a client would manage, and a custom website/cms that a developer manages. Webflow is kind of a site builder for the web developer. It does require knowledge in css and layouts but is also very visual. If you have a client that you think would like to sit down with you while doing some design changes, or A B testing, webflow allows for easy live manipulation of design and can be a good tool for something like that.

Segment 2 - Webflow Overview

Webflow Designer

The Webflow designer is the tool that is used to create the website itself.
It has the more advanced tools that allow a developer to “code visually” meaning that the majority of the controls they’re using are actual CSS properties that they would be typing in manually
For example, if you want to use flexbox on a particular section of your website, and have those flex items centered horizontally. You would add a div for the flex container, add divs for your flex items then with the UI actually set the display property to “flex” and then set your alignment. Instead of typing in CSS properties you’d be toggling the identical options in the Webflow UI
You have a lot of other standard CSS controls as well including things like:
- Classes & “Combo Classes”
- Width, max-width, min-width, height, max-height, min-height
- Padding
- Float and clear
- Overflow
- Position
- Typography & Fonts: family, font-weight, color, size, text decorations
- Borders
- Transitions
- etc.
Because this is an editor there are a bunch of non-standard CSS elements that you can add to your pages as well such as Containers that keep your content within a centered not full-width container, or social media widgets that have you entering in your username, or profile URL to setup a “like” or “follow” button
Symbols are a piece of a website that you use over and over on a website. Things like a navbar, footer, sidebar, or widget of some kind all make for great symbols
- Symbols allow you to just add them to a page with a couple clicks without having to copy+paste, or remake them in any way
Although I’m only now just starting to use this feature, a lot of the Webflow community seem to really enjoy what Webflow calls Interactions, which allows you to chain together events to create some pretty cool affects
- For example, detect the user scrolling to make a certain element move around the page
- Some triggers include: mouse events (click, move, & hover), scrolling (in various states like when an element is scrolled into view), page load, etc.
Webflow can also be used to just make the UI and then moved to a different platform, or web server via the export code feature.
In addition, Webflow now has an eCommerce beta for those of you looking to make an online store, however, I have yet to use this feature as it’s still in development and quite new to the general population of Webflow
This means you could make your UI with the visual tools, export the code, then use the CMS and hosting solution of your choice

Hosting

Webflow offers a range of hosting plans that range from simple sites that don’t need a CMS, through eCommerce, and full teams that run development agencies - check out which plan is right for you before you begin putting together projects to ensure you get all the features you need
In general I find that the Webflow pricing for hosting and CMS are quite expensive, however, it’s more of a “luxury” hosting in my opinion
Since the spring/summer of 2018 we’ve only seen 1 outage that affected anything for our customers and it was immediately reported by Webflow staff and quickly fixed
It’s important to note that Webflow isn’t like a standard host with cpanel, it only deals with the website. It does not take over your nameserver, it doesn’t have webmail and other features that you’ll find on other services.

CMS

The Webflow CMS is broken down into Collections which host content of a single type
Within each Collection are the Collection Items
A basic breakdown would be: Blog (Collection) contains posts (Collection Items) each post has a group of editable fields such as title, post body, cover image, etc. These editable fields are selected by the Designer.
There are a bunch of different types of fields that you can add to a Webflow collection including things like: plain text, rich text, image, video link, link, email, phone, numbers, date/time, toggle switch, color, option dropdown, file upload, reference, multi-reference
Specifically the reference CMS fields are used to reference other Collections
- For example: You could have a Blog Post with all the standard fields like title, post body etc, and then have a reference field that points to an “Authors” Collection that contains all the authors names and social media links. When editing a blog post you would select the author in a drop-down menu, that drop-down menu would be automatically populated via the other referenced Collection.
Keep in mind that the Webflow CMS does have limitations on how many reference and multi-reference fields you can add to a collection
In general it limits how many fields you can add to a Collection depending on which plan you choose so make sure you look through all the options

Editor

The Webflow editor is for the people that are editing the website, but don’t want access to the designer - Webflow refers to these accounts as “Collaborators”
The Editor offers a trimmed down editing interface that allows those with access to use the CMS to add items to collections via a standard editor that you’d see on something like WordPress
The Editor also allows users to edit some elements on the page, such as text and images, by hovering over elements and pressing an edit button - a more simple approach than that of the more advanced Designer

Limitations

- As there are with all website builders, there are some limitations that get in the way when working with Webflow
- Pagination wasn’t possible until recently, so large blogs would be limited in showing off all their posts, or there a workaround would have to be enacted. Note: Pagination is available now to all users.
- Sliders are not fully editable. Users within the Editor can edit the individual photos that appear within a slider, but are unable to add or remove slides - that functionality is limited to the Designer - I found a workaround but it is limited
- We were going to use Webflow for the HATT website, however, limitations in how Collections work limited our ability to do so. Specifically we were unable to have different post types (podcast, blog, etc.) and still be able to show them all in a mixed list on the front page. We’d be limited to displaying them in individual sections, per collection (blog, guide, podcast)
- We had a customer that wanted to put ads in an Ad Collection, each item would contain a banner that would be displayed on the site in a random order on every refresh. However, we are unable to do that with Webflow’s system, their version of random order which is “Keep in mind that because we cache your site pages on a CDN (which is why they load so fast!), your random sorts on published sites will refresh once every 12 hours. The upside is that everyone viewing the site will see the same (random) order.”

Pros: These limitations are either very specific to the customer, or they’ve been fixed with updates (with the exception of the slider editor). Webflow does update rather often so there’s a good chance more functionality will be added in the months to come - eCommerce is a new major feature that has been added since we started using Webflow which is a big step forward. You can also add your own scripts which can extend the functionality of your website if you understand Javascript

Conclusion

The Designer offers a unique “visual coding” experience that anyone familiar to CSS can take full advantage of
The CMS and Hosting are pricey, but sites load fast and are fixed quickly when there’s an issue (from our experience).
The Editor offers a limited easy-to-use interface for staff members that may not be tech-savvy, but still need edit the site’s content
The documentation and active community make it quick and easy to get help
Exporting code allows you to take your design to another compatible platform easily - avoiding the hosting and CMS plan charges

Web News - The Cookie Law

New May 2018 Reform of the EU GDPR law
If a company operates at all in the EU they must abide by these rules which make them state all information they are collection and allow the user to opt out
This is why now when visiting almost any website you get a popup somewhere that asks you “yes or no” to collecting cookies as well as a blurb about what they collect.
On the one hand it’s great to have this transparency but on the other it seems that almost every time I visit a website this happens, even if it’s the same site and I was there a day before. This leads to a annoying user experience
I think a “Accept All Cookies” button for all cookie websites would be a great idea for the informed user. Having it so someone has to find it and click it would be enough consent in my opinion.
How do you feel about required transparency?
Do you think the EU can be overbearing at times with these anti Corporate pro consumer type laws?
- I.e. Hitting google with a 5 billion dollar fine over the fact that their android platform being too dominant
- Sometimes these hits to large companies can be passed back onto the customer

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Your First Website Contract

6 februari 2019 | 72 min

In this episode Mike and Matt discuss what it's like to take on your first website contract as a complete beginner web developer, focusing on a small business website refresh.

Segment 1 - Gathering Requirements

We’ve talked about requirements a few times but this whole conversation will be very specific to a typical first site that a developer will have to do for their first project.
So in this scenario a small business call Happy Coffee has approached you with a request for their old site to be updated. The site is from the early 2000 and is very old, not responsive and has outdated information about their business.
They would like you to update their online presence with the new web standards and make their site look more modern.
Your job here is to figure out what the clients preferences are and if they align with your vision for the new site
Ask them to send you some sites of the their competitors they like and to highlight the specific sections that appeal to them
Ask them about specific features that you know are common to these kinds of ‘business card/online presence’ type sites.
- Contact forms
- Large cover images
- Services offered
- Map of the location
- Hours of operation
- Small “Our Story” section
- Photo Gallery
It’s also important to gauge if they have content for you or if you will need to generate content yourself, whether that is images or text.
This will give you a great starting point for either creating a static site from scratch or choosing a template to fill in and adjust
Now usually during the more general portion of this process you’ll also be discussing pricing but I’m going to intentionally leave that part out as it’s a whole other can of worms and can be discussed in a separate episode. But usually for a first project, my advice is to be reasonable with your pricing, don’t do it for free but know that this is a stepping stone and the client is taking as much of a risk on you as you are sacrificing price wise for the client.

Segment 2 - Design and Iteration

Generally when someone wants a basic website, especially when it’s a small business, they’ll want to keep the budget low, cutting down on hours is probably one of the easiest ways to lower the price for a customer, having a basic design allows you to cut down some hours while maintaining quality
Often times on larger websites clients will want a wireframe, as well as a prototype, or a fully done-up visual design before they’ll approve the look and you can start coding
When it comes to smaller projects we’ll generally skip a lot of the designing procedure and rely solely on wireframes for a visual aid
As a brief aside, even some of our larger customers accept wireframes as the basis of their design in order to keep costs down and get the project up and running as quickly as possible
Typically we’ll make 3-4 different wireframe layouts based on what the customer has requested, often times we’ll get a few reference sites (as Mike mentioned) from them during the gathering requirements stage of our interaction to speed up our wireframe creation
After showing off the various wireframe designs, we’ll get the client to choose their favourite one, get general feedback if they’re not happy with any of them, or get them to mix-and-match pieces of the wireframes together (slider from design 1, footer from design 3, etc.)
This part of the procedure can take anywhere from a few hours, to over a week depending on how involved your client would like to be in the design - sometimes the design will flip-flop between a few options before finally landing on the one that will be put into production, so this step requires patience
One thing of note, all clients are different, but from our experience if you’re struggling with the basics of choosing one of the designs that you made (ie the client doesn’t like any of them) sometimes you need to have a discussion with them to reiterate what their goals are to ensure that you’re on the same page (ie you might be focusing on showing off their photos, while they just want people to see the phone number and call the office)
Luckily with simple designs the selection procedure is often the least painful and you’ll be off to the development stage in no time

Segment 3 - Development

Since this is a simple static site development is fairly straight forward
There are a few choices you will be faced with
- Go with a template
- Create a static site from scratch
If time allows I would recommend creating a site from scratch as you will learn the basics a lot better, and give yourself a better understanding of CSS, HTML and JS
The workflow I do when creating a site is I first create a skeleton file structure with the typical css and js and img folders. Depending on how you were taught you can either do this manually or with webpack and babel. I’ll focus more on just a simple file structure now but don’t be afraid to use the tools you were taught if you are comfortable with them.
When creating the folder structure create all the necessary files you’ll need to start the site
- Index.html
- Main.css
- Main.js
- mailer.php
For the html I like to create the structure of the entire site (assuming it’s a one page site like this one)
- I try to keep it as basic as possible with the fewest container divs as I can
- Hopefully you have all the content you need for the site already but if you don’t make sure to use lorem ipsum or placeholder images so you can just quickly replace the when you have them
For css my recommendation is to start with a flexbox layout, as it’s supported on most browser version and will not require you to create backwards compatibility/fall back css
- Remember to make the site responsive, combining flexbox features and media queries makes this relatively simple for a small site such a this
For js all you’ll really have to handle is the contact form ajax call. So organize a ajax object based on your input fields and create a ajax request to your php contact form to start the mailer process
Mailer.php will then handle creating the email and sending it.
Make sure to do some testing on any device you can get your hands on. Especially smaller phones and tablets as those can be weird resolutions you might have missed. If you have a few friends that can test out the site for you that's always suggested as getting a fresh look on something can be hugely beneficial. They will be able to pick out any glaring errors if they exist right away.
It is also a good idea to set yourself up for future revisions, so if the client states that they will be updating the logo every season or year create a simple file structure and file naming scheme without your application that will make it easy for you to update these files in the future

Segment 4 - Deployment

Often times when a customer is just refreshing their design, they’ll want to keep the same setup that they have - same host, domain name, etc. which makes your setup rather easy
Assuming they want their setup the same, you can typically ask for FTP access and then upload your new site design, this is of course assuming you want to go live right away
One important thing of note, is that if you’re replacing an existing website, it’s a good idea to take a backup of it. All setups are different, but in general, creating a new folder called “OLD” and putting the old site files in there is a good way to ensure you don’t delete something vital, or have the site go down for long in the event that something goes wrong with your new design
If something does go wrong with the new design, you can always revert your changes to the old design by copying those “OLD” files back to where they were to lessen the amount of downtime a user might see
In addition, a site owner may want to keep the old site around for people to use for a few weeks before migrating over to the new one, or they may want to get customer feedback on the new design before fully committing and taking the OLD site offline
Every situation is different when it comes to deployment - always remember to never delete something that you can’t get back easily - back it up, even if the changes you’re inputting seem trivial

Web News - Android Desktop & Chrome OS

Software ecosystems are meant to bridge the gap between different pieces of hardware - computer (desktop/laptop), tablet, phone, smartwatch
These ecosystems bring the notifications and other features that we all enjoy, cross-platform so that we can continue to enjoy them at our desk or on the go
In general, a lot of these ecosystems are bridging a literal OS gap where people use multiple operating systems in a single device setup such as Windows, Android, Wear OS
Recently the Pixel Slate was released bringing a “laptop-like” tablet that can run Android apps on top of Chrome OS, this type of device is basically a hardware bridge of sorts that is trying to bring you the portability of a tablet, the versatility of using familiar Android apps from your phone, while still having the ability to be used as a traditional laptop - assuming you buy a type-cover for it
This begs the question, where does Chrome OS fit into the equation, when it leverages the use of Android apps?
Should we just have an Android version that is “computer friendly” or goes into a “computer mode” of sorts (ie Samsung Dex)?
Is this rather strange hardware/software bridge pointing towards a future of one OS on multiple devices?

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Negative Customer Relations

30 januari 2019 | 68 min

In this episode we discuss the difficult conversations we all face when dealing with customers including pricing, misunderstandings, and more. Segment 1 - Saying No

Sometimes customers relations aren’t just selling them on your latest theme, service, or skill - there comes a time where you have to deal with intricacies that have a negative connotation attached to them
Specifically these are often: pricing, value (of work and of the product to the customer), bad content (low quality images, bad copy, etc.) - essentially you’re saving them from themselves, their web presence should start out on the right foot when you’re done with it

Pricing
- Pricing is almost always a major point of contention between you and your customer
- People always want a lower price, and they’ll try anything to get it
- The issue with you constantly lowering your price is that even if you don’t intentionally do this, you will have a lesser quality product because your motivation to complete it will drop.
- Scope creep (customers adding features onto the original scope of the project) is especially bad when you’re doing a project and being underpaid - and the outcome will be of lesser quality
- You should go into a pricing meeting with a price range in your head, or one solid price if you aren’t willing to negotiate, and stick to the plan. If the customer is unwilling to pay a price that you’re okay with, then you just have to back out politely (this isn’t gonna work, thanks for your time)
- When it comes to older businesses, or specifically ones that don’t run off the internet, they have issues paying for online services like web development because their business doesn’t generally value the web too much

Value
- Value and pricing go hand-in-hand, everyone wants what they paid for and preferably a low price on a high value
- Sell customers on the value of your work can be difficult depending on how much they rely on their website
- For example, if a company if almost completely reliant on their eCommerce site then upgrading it - even for a high price - may be something they’re willing to do to ensure the revenue keeps flowing
- On the flip side, if you are working with a customer that simply has an online presence, like a basic website with a phone number - they’ll generally generate their customer via other means (newspapers, word of mouth, billboards, etc.) and therefore will value their online presence less.
- When you have a customer that doesn’t value your services much, often times the project will be less complex, however, they won’t offer you a fair dollar for it because it doesn’t generate them enough business to pay for itself over the short term.
- Sometimes a customer is looking to become more active online, which is why you were contacted, but they still don’t know the value of a good online presence, what it takes to generate traffic, how to manage social media, etc. In this case it can be very difficult to get a customer on-board with a price that you’re good with, versus the amount of work he wants done to become relevant online because they don’t understand the value of the work you’ll be doing for them

Bad Content
- We’ve all been there, you’ve been hired to look at an old website that was designed for old SD monitors, you come up with a plan to revitalize it which results in a list of photos and other content that you require the customer send to you (ie staff photos, office photos, staff bios, etc.) and they just say to use the old ones because they look good
- This is one of the hardest things to convince people to change, they’re attached to the old photos and text that they wrote years ago, but those small SD photos just aren’t equipped to handle the HD screens of today and will look awful
- It’s your job, as unfortunate as it is, to politely push back on customers explaining to them that if they’re refreshing their site, they can’t have old assets on there or else it will look awful. You need to try and convince them to update everything to modern standards and to ensure that any copy is up-to-date
- In order to do this try and tell them that their customers will take notice that their site looks messy, or slapped together for cheap which will leave them with a bad first impression.
- You can also offer to make some of the content for them, if you’re willing and able to, for a price of course.
- Ultimately it's your job to ensure that their web presence gets off on the right foot when you’re done with the project, ensure that things are as high of quality as you can.

Segment 2 - Aggressive Interactions

Handling a client that is angry can be a challenge
There are a few strategies that we use to to handle these situations when they arise
- Let the client say their piece fully without interrupting them because if they are angry it’s important to figure out why before you can diffuse the situation
- Once they seem to be done try to show empathy and don’t deflect their problem back at them. Even if it’s fully their fault take some time to think of it from their side and try to explain to them why the situation happened and what you will do to fix it
- Don’t fire back at the customer, it will make them angrier, usually if you treat them with respect through this process they will realize they are overreacting.
Usually the reasons for these aggressive behaviours can be:
- Miscommunications
- Pricing conflicts
- Design misunderstandings
- Encountering bugs
Remember you’re the professional in this situation so you have to act like it. Prove to the customer that they should trust you with your decisions.
When you make a mistake own it and give the customer your immediate solution and the steps you will take for them to not happened again
Mistakes happened, most people will be very reasonable when they do as long as you’re clear with them. Aggression can occur when you try to hide something from the customer, especially if it’s a hidden cost or a detrimental experience.

Segment 3 - Waiting

A lot of negative customer relations can come from having to wait for a client
Waiting for them to answer an email, respond to your phone call, give you content, or any other situation where you are being held up by the clients lack of communication
Situations can arise where you have a tight deadline set by your client but are being forced to wait on them for content which will cause you to miss the deadline.
To mitigate these situations you have to give your clients deadlines as well. Clearly explain that if they do not meet them then you cannot finish by the deadline they need their product by. These clear and deliberate communications will set a precedent with your clients.
Some good advice that I heard listening to the latest Syntax podcast [The Freelance Client Lifecycle] was to treat your clients as more of a partnership with them. Where you are trying to get something done together, rather than a them vs us mentality.
As we are learning some clients don’t like to read emails in their entirety so it might be beneficial to give them a call a day or so after a lengthy email and ask if they have any questions or concerns

False Urgency
- A major pet peeve that comes into projects in a variety of ways
- Entails calling something an emergency without there actually being an emergency
- Often times causes things to be rushed and of lower quality than they would be normally
- Sometimes this can cause additional charges on clients who are unsuspecting
- Common false urgency dispatchers:
  - Marking emails are urgent
  - Saying something is an emergency within an email
  - Calling a frequently or out of normal work hours (late at night, early in the morning)
- These dispatchers are exactly how people actually contact you for a real emergency, however, they’ll try and add urgency to something that isn’t actually urgent just to get it done faster
- Often times we’ll quickly do whatever they ask if we’re available only to have those edits go unchecked, or unused, for several weeks
- Constant false urgency calls only result in slower response times, and may result in actual emergencies being missed because of the “boy who called wolf” scenario

Web News - The Facebook Messaging Toss-Up

“Facebook is working to allow cross-messaging between Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to a report in The New York Times this morning. Each service will continue to operate as a standalone app, but according to the Times, Facebook is rebuilding the underlying infrastructure so that people who might use only one of Facebook’s properties could communicate with others within the company’s ecosystem. All of the apps will support end-to-end encryption as well. Facebook has yet to provide a timeline for when this will happen.” - The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197228/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-merge-messaging-services-mark-zuckerberg)

Facebook Spokesperson Statement

“We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private. We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks. As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work.” - The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197228/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-merge-messaging-services-mark-zuckerberg)

What of Instagram Direct?
- It’s integrated into Instagram itself, does that mean we’ll have duplicate notifications?
- There is a separate Instagram messaging app available in limited countries (not in Canada) called “Direct from Instagram” maybe the messages will be removed from the main Instagram app?
Facebook messaging was removed from Facebook’s app and put into “Messenger”
WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014
General UX Questions
- Will there be a main app that people should use?
- Will you lose native features of an app that you don’t have installed (ie WhatsApp profile pic)
- Is there going to be a totally new combined app for phones?
- Will this work on PC? (if I boot up Messenger either within facebook.com or on the separate web app, will I be able to message WhatsApp folks?)
- Do I need to sign-up for all of them?
Assuming you just need one app, which one are you going to use?

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Tips and Tricks

23 januari 2019 | 63 min

In this episode we share some of our tips and tricks that we've picked up along our many web development and design adventures. Segment 1 - Matt’s Tips & Tricks

Server/Hosting Management
- Common things like this include: WordPress updates (plugin updates), migrating to a different server/host, testing a new major feature, adding something a client has requested - but you think won’t work out which will result in a rollback
- Always backup files and databases that you won’t be able to get back in their existing state
- Be wary of new commands if you have command line access, especially if they’re aimed at deleting files, or folders
- Have a recovery plan before you begin so that you can quickly and easily rollback your changes if something goes terribly wrong - planning this out properly may require you to take full backups, prepare a re-upload solution, research re-installation information on some of the software you’re using
- Have a testing environment setup that mimics your production environment preferably
CSS
- Don’t be afraid of simply setting up a skeleton before moving onto a different part of the site - having a skeleton of the top bar while branding is being figured out is a good way to get started on the site, and frees you up to spend more time on other elements that are more definitive (ie slider, contact form, etc.)
- Make your class names easily identifiable, whether you use a naming convention or not, at the very least use something that you’ll be able to identify later and that other developers would be able to pickup on if they interact with your project in the future (example classnames: navbar, nav-item, footer, topbar)
- Comments (and this goes for other languages to) should be done to clarify things for yourself in the future, or for other developers down the road, however, sometimes you understand something using references in your own head - do not hesitate to make comments specific to you if you’re actively working on the project, using references that only you understand - making the comments more generic for others when production hits
- Test responsivity with true window widths, not just responsive tools, sometimes these tools don’t reflect exactly how different browser window widths will actually react which can result in some overflow left-to-right or some broken elements altogether

Segment 2 - Mikes Tips and Tricks (JS Tips)

Use a scope variable
- If you’re using just straight javascript for a single page or multipage website create a scope global variable. Make sure that this is your only global variable for the whole project but if you need to pass state or variables between files or pages then use only scope to keep some form of structure and minimize conflicts
Use libraries when necessary
- Make sure it has been updated in the past year at least
- Make sure the documentation is fairly easy to understand
- Check the Open issues tab in github and make sure that there are plenty of closed issues and check those closed issues to make sure you are fine with the answers given as if you have an issue you will have a similar experience
- When working on a large project there will be times when you’ve gotta complete features under a time limit. This is where libraries can really save you a huge amount of time and headache. I recently had to create a searchable list for an application with the ability to auto filter the visible list as you type. Even though this is definitely something I could have created from scratch I didn’t want to waste my clients time if that is unnecessary. Doing a quick google search yielded plenty of well maintained, small and feature rich libraries. One called list.js really exceeded my expectations. Here are some tips for checking if a library is worth using:
Do your best to write self documenting code with comments being used only when necessary
- I am very deliberate in my function and variable names to make it easy to go back to my code and understand what is going on
- If a function is calculating the taxes on the order then call that function calculateTax()
- Try to avoid using ternary operators (condition ? true expression : false expression) in code that will need to be maintained by multiple people over long periods of time. As ‘professional’ as they make you look they are not easier to understand then a simple if statement. Nor do they impact performance in any way
Refactor and clean up code often
- With larger projects code can get out of hand really fast. If you’re programming at speed and do a lot of testing where you comment out sections and write new ones to see differences those commented out sections can add up and can contribute to confusion and maintainability in the future
- Sometimes you can preemptively create variables and functions and then never use them going forward. These are just taking up space in memory and adding even more complexity to your code for no reason. These are prime candidates for removal in a refactor
Chrome Dev tools are your friend
- These are a huge help to me on a daily basis. Being able to put a breakpoint in my code and view what all my variables read at that time makes testing and writing code so much easier

Web News - Software as a service

With most software companies move to a monthly or yearly subscription model has the standalone application now become a unicorn in our industry?
paying only 5-20 dollars a month for a premium application seems like a easier sell to people then asking them for 100+ upfront. But these 5-20 dollars a month add up and could very well be a much bigger hit on your wallet in the future
Knowing you never own the actual product is also a weird feeling
For the company having consistent recurring income is a huge bonus and allows them to plan much further ahead with features and support. Also very few yearly version upgrades happen, instead choosing to maintain and add features to the same version. This makes for less need to upgrade or migrate to different versions
In my experience a company that gets a monthly subscription is less likely to abandon their product
- I.e android app Weather Timeline was a paid application but with it being only a one time fee it wasn’t able to maintain it’s costs and had to take the application down from the store and later on sell it to a different publisher
What do you prefer, a one time bulk fee (approx $100) or a $5-$20 subscription?

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Coding Challenge Wrap-Up

16 januari 2019 | 68 min

In this episode we discuss our recently completed coding challenge, making "No BS News for Reddit"

Note: We had some audio issues with the first upload of this episode, if you hear nothing, simply delete your version and re-download to get the updated file. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Segment 1 - Pre-Planning & Design

As apart of this challenge we were allowed to plan, design, and research before the challenge began
To prepare we did some research on PWAs and their functionality
We also researched other news apps, and what subreddits would be the most useful
From a UX perspective, we took a look at which features a Reddit user would need and expect from a Reddit app - minus the social features of course
From this we came up with some wireframes to guide our design throughout the process, which we modified on the spot to accomodate for a “open Reddit post” button alongside alternative share options for PC users
We also had a discussion regarding the addition of custom news sets, where users could select a bunch of subreddits to pull into a single custom feed - this ended up using up a decent amount of time and we didn’t put it into the app in its current state
One other design challenge that we had was making the design pop
Since this sort of app is so text-heavy we were concerned that its monotone nature would end up making it boring, or otherwise, look unfinished and rushed. However, after spending more time on Reddit we realized that this type of app is more utilitarian than it is flashy, so we decided to place it in a dark theme and let the links “do the talking”

Segment 2 - App Development

Development went smoothly for the most part
We were able to complete almost all the features that we originally set out to make, including a few extra ones
We had a few bugs popup that were dealt with quickly, namely some responsivity issues with overlapping and some time stamps that were coming in as negative numbers
Vuejs seemed to almost accelerate development due too it’s built in development server and its short code nature for functions and listeners
Vuejs also created the template for the PWA functionality through the Vue CLI
App functionality implementation went as planned and didn’t pose much difficulty other then a couple of hiccups and glitches that had to be fixed
- Showing how much time has elapsed since each post was posted showed to be kind of annoying because of how reddit handles UTC time. I have to multiple the time by 1000 to match with the the current UTC time
Working with the reddit api is awesome and a great way to learn API’s and working with json
The app is pretty much feature complete as in line with our MVP (minimum viable product)
Couple of features we are looking to add would be :
- a way to create a custom news group
- Light theme to go along with the current dark one
The motto for adding features to this is “Is that bullshit?” if we think it is, then we don’t add it

Segment 3 - App Deployment

So we’ve already had a few episodes where we talk about deployment in a little more detail but it’s valuable to mention how we went about doing this for the 24 hour challenge aspect
This was by far the most frustrating part of the entire day as this would be only my second time deploying with Docker and to digital ocean
It is simpler than the html all the things deployment because there is no server side containers but due to the time constraint and the fact we started deployment only at around 12am it turned into a problem
The initial deployment as a web app went ok until we hit the SSL certification
We used the same method as with HTML all the things, where we are trying to certify a docker container running nginx using certbot on our ubuntu digitalocean droplet
Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of experience and combined with already being mentally exhausted I went into a try everything approach instead of using logic
Logically looking at it with a fresh head after getting some sleep got a solution in a matter of minutes
- Although this was frustrating this is all part of these short time challenges and must be overcome if anyone wants to be able to work in crunch periods
- Sometimes it’s important to step away, as I did that at least 2 or 3 times during the challenge to solve random issues
For next time I think we might do a initial pre deployment before the challenge to at least get the ssl and nginx container worked out, so we have more time to focus on actually developing

Web News - Personal Opinions on PWA

Disclaimer: We have minimal experience with PWAs in both the development and consumer side of things, so these are simply our opinions having minimal exposure
Progressive Web Apps fall into a strange segment of the market, because they’re not quite native apps, and not quite websites (at least under the hood)
We’ve entered into a time where the internet is relied upon to power a lot of things and therefore an internet browser of some kind is almost always open on people’s computers, or phones
On the PC, it’s rare that people use traditional “apps” like Facebook, for example, but rather use the website facebook.com which serves virtually the same purpose
PWAs seem to be the bridge between the two, adding accessible offline features to web developers that are creating websites, or web apps, that will eventually need a mobile app of some sort
With that being said, there seems to be a bit of a stigma against non-native software, things like WebViews and other app types are readily available, but the big apps seemt to almost always go the native route - even if that means making two entirely separate apps (iOS and Android), or dealing with porting between the two in some capacity
So where do we feel PWAs fit in?
Will they take off?
Will they displace native apps?
Are they here to stay?

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Code Challenge - No BS News for Reddit

14 januari 2019 | 30 min

Maintaining Your Skills

9 januari 2019 | 61 min

Happy New Year! 2019 has just kicked off, and so has another year of podcasts. In this episode we discuss maintaining your skills after long periods away from your desk. This is the perfect compliment to the recently completed holiday season as many of us are just now getting back to work. Segment 1 - Keeping Things in Practice

Keep using the technology you deem valuable
- The main way I stay on top of my skills is seemingly an obvious answer. By using them
- This can be a little difficult though with so many technologies out there and as we’ve mentioned many times it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the choice
- What I try to do is choose projects that will incorporate the technology I value
- Sometimes this requires convincing your employer and contractor to adopt something they are not familiar with. So it’s important to be knowledgeable of the positives and be very clear with the downsides right from the get go.
- Recently I’ve been proposing using Vue.js for some contract projects
Keep up to date with updates
- As technology evolves it usually get a wider feature set and perspective of when to use it can change
- I try to stay on top of technologies such as node, Vue.js, react and read their change logs. If a new feature gets announced I try to figure out where I can use it and how to implement it (usually using the documentation). Even if I don’t implement it just by going through the exercise of figuring out how it works I retain a little bit of that knowledge and will more likely know to come back to it when a new project pops up.

Segment 2 - Combating the Loss of Knowledge

- When you’re away from your desk for a long time, you’ll become rusty at your everyday tasks and may completely forget new things that you learned just before leaving
- Furthermore, there are often times that certain snippets of code are used a single time per project and therefore don’t stay fresh in our minds because we rarely see them
- It’s easy to stress over losing knowledge like this because we invested time in learning new skills and in a few short weeks they could be completely gone from our memory
- There are a variety of ways to combat this, but it’s not something to stress over as it’s just a natural procedure that our brains do that is out of our control

Recording Snippets

- - Programmers of all kinds, whether it be web developers, game devs, or even hobbyists all have some sort of snippets manager
  - Often times these take the form of a snippets managing software, but it can be as simple as keeping old projects and files laying around in a folder somewhere
  - One key component to generating snippets is that your code is modularized rather than proprietary for each application, meaning you want to code up functions that can be used over and over again - If you have an application that uses AJAX for example, there should be an AJAX function that you can pass arguments into, rather than AJAX being done somewhere inside of another multipurpose function
  - Snippet managers are great when you code up something that you know you will use repeatedly, but rarely need to interact with directly
  - Example 1: You make functions that access and interact with an API once, then you focus on making the application using the data that comes from that API
  - Example 2: You make a collection of CSS buttons that you use on a variety of projects
  - Personally, I use a bunch of old projects and files inside of a folder because I always think of the project I did something in, in the past, rather than the name of a generic function. However, I’d like to build up a snippet library in a formal piece of software
  - There are a bunch of snippet managing software out there, I haven’t used any personally, but some of the ones that came up in a quick search include: Boostnote (https://boostnote.io/), Cacher (https://www.cacher.io/), and Bracket Snippets for Brackets (https://github.com/jrowny/brackets-snippets)

Letting Selective Knowledge Go

- One of our programming teachers in college said that he would selectively let knowledge leave his brain once he had learned and implemented it
- Specifically he was referring to a driver that he had written for a microcontroller that we were using in his lab class. He said that he only needed to learn the information for certain parts of the driver once, implement the driver they way he wanted based on his new knowledge, then he forgot about that specific piece of information he learned because he had already gotten from it what he needed
- This might be a hard pill to swallow, especially since things take forever to learn when we’re new to them, but it’s a valid statement
- If you think about it, if you were working at a company as a Ruby on Rails developer and suddenly got changed to a different team that exclusively uses jQuery for their projects, you’re going to forget Ruby on Rails pretty quickly if you don’t keep your practice up on your own time
- I like to think of it as, I learned something to gain value in some way, expended that value to its fullest for my given situation, then moved on.

Web News - 2018 in Review, Road Ahead to 2019

2018 Podcast Download Numbers
- July - 72 downloads
- August - 378 downloads
- September - 973 downloads
- October - 1234 downloads
- November - 1683 downloads
- December - 1569 downloads
- 2018 total: 5909 downloads
2018 Spotify Stream Numbers
- July - 0 streams
- August - 84 streams
- September - 333 streams
- October - 618 streams
- November - 718 streams
- December - 686 streams
- 2018 total: 2439 streams
As of January 7, 2019
- Instagram Followers - 448
- Twitter Followers - 60
- Facebook Page Likes - 57
2018 in Review
- Higher numbers than expected across the board
- Podcast was supposed to be a side thing in comparison to templates, snippets, etc, but has become a staple of HATT
- Learned a bunch of social media tips and tricks, with a focus on Instagram, secondary focus on Twitter
Goals for 2019
- Over 2k Instagram followers
- Monetization of HATT through multiple means
- Create a developer community through HATT where people can meet other developers going through similar paths to them, finding people to work with
- Mikes Goals
  - Go all in on vue.js
  - Get a youtube tutorial series up
  - Become comfortable with webpack and code splitting
- Matt’s Goals
  - Master CSS Grid
  - Start something on YouTube (Webflow guide? Something else?)
  - Further my knowledge of social media
  - Amass to: Get a steady passive income stream setup and running

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Motivation

19 december 2018 | 82 min

In this episode Mike and Matt discuss motivation in it's many forms, and how it affects working on variety of projects.

Segment 1 - Types of Motivation

Different types of motivation range from the tinkerer all the way to the passionate
Being in any of these camps generally dictates how much effort, and time, that you’ll put into a field that you’re checking out
In terms of web development & design, having a different level of motivation will no doubt determine where you fall within the field - maybe you’ll make a single website for fun, or maybe pursue a career
One thing of note, these classifications of motivation are from our own experiences and ideas, they aren’t some sort of “official” classification of any kind

Passionate
- When you’re passionate about something you’ll typically take it more seriously and do in-depth research to learn new things
- This type of motivation may steer your career decisions, or help you set up a side hustle of some kind
- For the web field, this generally means you won’t be using your “local” website builder like Squarespace, but rather diving in head first to the code, determining what tools you’d like to use and how to use them efficiently

“Forced”
- Sometimes you’re figuratively “forced” into a doing something due to outside pressures, such as financial situation, or availability of work
- When this happens you may take your work seriously, however, you’ll be taking it more seriously and efficiently than someone who wants to be there, because generally you’ll want to get in there and just get the work done
- Often times people get trapped into these types of situations due to the outside pressures never alleviating, or more that suddenly pile on, leaving you trying to find methods to get out of the field
- Bringing this into the web industry, sometimes people will be “forced” to do professional web work, either full time, or by being in an associated tech field that suddenly requires web work. Generally this type of work will be rushed in some way, having tasks done in the quickest way possible - often leaving a lesser quality product

Hobbyist
- Hobbyists are people that like to do a variety of things, and get into them all the way, stopping just before getting professional.
- There are of course varying degrees of hobbyists, but generally, they could technically operate in the professional realm given a small amount of training
- Bringing this again to the web industry, hobbyists will generally not focus on one tool, language, or segment of the industry, but rather fan out and use a bunch of different tools ranging from site builders like Squarespace, then dabble in some code - getting a full range of experience to build some sites that they’re interested in, sometimes these lead to a side hustle if they’re successful

Tinkerer
- Tinkerers are one step below hobbyists, and are generally just interested in a field in some remote way
- They’ll do a variety of “light duties” within their interest, things such as reading some material, or maybe dabbling slightly within the field itself, stopping well short of investing any sort of money, or serious time, into learning a given field
- When it comes to the web industry, these people often need a single website for something they’re working on, they’ll read up on different site builders online and then just use a template so they can get to work - this of this as more of a blogger that doesn’t want to deal with their website, but instead their work is their writing itself, so they familiarize themselves with the path of least resistance to get a website up and running and that’s it

Segment 2 - What Motivates Us

Pure Enjoyment for coding
Creating something from scratch
Looking at examples of other people's work and striving to achieve something similar
- Looking through sites and trying to find motivation for your work
Having someone or a group request something that you could make
Small amount of adrenalin from fixing difficult issues
Being part of the coding community
- Having people reach out to you for help or opinion
Keeping up/learning new technology

Segment 3 - Motivation Blockers

To many projects on the go making it difficult to focus on one
- Prioritize and use task management applications like Asana
Running into a problem that takes several days to solve
- Take a step back from the problem and maybe try to complete a smaller easier task
Difficult clients
- This is a tough one but try to understand where your client is coming from and if you can relate to their issues
Programmers envy
- There will always be people that are better than you but also people that are still trying to catch up to your level. It is important to learn how to focus just on yourself
Procrastination
- Just start something, start with smaller more accomplishable tasks and build up to the harder and longer ones.
Links
- Dan Mace's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMTJRYmQkbc
- Joe Rogan's show with Derren Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_tpWrv76Q8

Web News - Scams

Scams are becoming more frequent and more complex
There isn’t a day that goes by that some sort of scam hits our email inboxes, often times being screened out by the spam filter, however, with complexity growing these scams often get through that level of defense, leaving the user to further filter out their inbox
In addition to email scams, there’s phone scams, and even in-person ones that people have to avoid
One thing that we’ve found is that email scams are getting harder and harder to notice - the one tell-all used to be an incorrect “from” address but even that is now being spoofed to look legitimate
The other day I received a properly branded Cyber Monday email from what looked like the real amazon email, but it only lead to a website that was trying to get me to sign up
The worst most recent one is someone impersonating us in an email - basically one of our clients will receive an email that says it’s from us when it’s not, and asks to download an attachment - meanwhile we’ll receive the same thing, an email that looks like it’s from our client also trying to get us to download an attachment
We’ve even had a brand new business credit card compromised whilst it was still in a safe at home
What are you thoughts on scams? Have you fallen for any? What can be done about this?

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Design, Develop, Deploy

12 december 2018 | 85 min

This week we discuss breaking out of our comfort zone to finally develop an app via a coding challenge.

Segment 1 - The Idea

Parameters
- Our idea needed to be something that was accessible, yet popular enough to get in front of people and actually get downloaded
- In order to get downloads we knew the reach had to be decent, it had to be something that people would find useful, but it had to be simple enough in order to be developed quickly
- We decided to analyze our previous experiences in launching apps, specifically our Chrome App and Chrome Extension collection
- What we found was that, with very little promotion on our end, making a product that compliments an existing popular product gives you exposure through “osmosis”
- Specifically speaking, our most popular app is Multiple Accounts for Outlook.com, which allows people to quickly switch between multiple outlook.com accounts and their associated web apps, like OneDrive
- From there we took a look at our recent personal app experiences, as well as the Google Play store - our targeted app store
- All of this ultimately boiled down to the next subsection “The Decision”

The Decision
- We’ve decided to do a minimalist reddit news app that strips away any distraction from actually reading the news
- We’ll get more into what I mean by “minimalist” in the next segment, but generally we’ll take away a bunch of the default reddit features that people can get distracted by
- We also have experience pulling information from reddit, via Mike’s joke generator that he used on his Introduction to Vue.js Guide (https://medium.com/html-all-the-things/introduction-to-my-vue-js-guide-ee9f4baad61)
- This app is far from reinventing the wheel, but it gets us going on finally releasing an app on Google Play, which we’ve been talking about for years, but never done
- The app will be monetized by ads, however, we plan on making the ads non-fullscreen and non-intrusive so that users aren’t bogged down by ads that have issues loading - this will be our first encounter with ads in an app as well so we’ll see how this strategy moves forward, maybe it’ll change, maybe it won’t work at all
- This app is rather simple in design and scope, but it’s actually accomplishing a great deal of smaller points that we’ve been aiming to get done specifically...

Accomplishments & Goals
- Trying out a community event: One of our goals with HTML All The Things was to get the people involved to some extent if they wanted to try out new things for us. This coding challenge is the first of its kind for us, and we’ll be the guinea pigs to see if it works out - maybe if it goes well we’ll do a public version of some kind
- Social media coverage - Right now we post about our podcast episode releases, share people’s work, etc. However, we’ve been wanting to try and “live post” to an extent. Share work as it’s being completed, so we’re aiming to share a bunch of content during this coding challenge’s time window. Things like posts of our progress as they happen, maybe get some videos in there - we’ll have to see how it pans out.
- Releasing an App: We’ve been talking about releasing an app on Google Play for a long time and we’ve always brushed it off, this challenge should give us a push to actually get it done - even if we fail the challenge and don’t release the app on time, we’ll have dived into the app development so much that we’ll essentially have no choice but to release the app for fear of wasting all that time - forcing ourselves to take on the risk
- Furthering Our Knowledge: We’re planning on using pwa for this project, however, we’ll be needing some plugins and functionality that we’ve never used with it, so we’ll be learning on the fly

Segment 2 - Design, Develop, Deploy

If we assume that our “decision” in Segment 1 is final, and we are actually doing an Reddit News App, let’s dive into how we would take this project on
One of the most important things we need for this challenge is to identify what our MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Research, Design, Development, Deploy
Research is complete already, app decision has been made
Mission Statement: Simple Reddit new aggregate for people that want to quickly view the news in their area without any distractions.
Parameters of the challenge?
- What can we do before/after?
- What we need to accomplish during the challenge?
- What’s the endgame?
Design
- Use a css framework?
- Light/Dark theme?
- Simplistic no bs design to to make the news a quick scroll away
- Naming
- Features
  - Pull posts from multiple subreddits and display as one multi subreddit
  - Remove all unnecessary attributes like karma count, comments, etc to display a minimalistic news block
  - Allow user to select their regions news
  - Ability to share articles through android/iOS share menu
  - Ability to view articles in webview without leaving the app
  - Ability to switch between light/dark theme
  - Ability to switch between Top, new, controversial, hot
Develop
- Vue.js
  - Vuex for state management
    - No accounts, but local storage and Vuex for data persistence and resource sharing
- CSS Grid for layout
Deploy
- Deploy on Nginx through docker on Digitalocean

Web News - Edge going Chromium?

Microsoft announced it will be moving away form EdgeHTML to Chromium for a future version of the Edge Browser
A Project Manager moderately confirmed that most chrome extensions will work
New Edge will be on Xbox One, MacOS as well as Android and iOS
Mozilla is not happy that Microsoft is giving Google a monopoly and has reaffirmed their efforts to provide users a choice
Developers will now not have to support EdgeHTML
Electron played a key role in the decision to switch to Chromium instead of Firefox

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The Hustle

5 december 2018 | 77 min

In this episode Mike & Matt discuss the entrepreneurial hustle, focusing in on the online freelance game for web developers and designers. Segment 1 - Freelancing Online

There are a lot of developers, writers, virtual assistants, and more that work freelance online
As a small business, we have experience getting work from freelancing websites and other site resources, however, please note that we work almost exclusively in the web development/design segment of the business so your mileage may vary if you’re freelancing in a different field
There are a lot of different websites and services that are set up for freelancers and their customers, most of them are basically job boards with full service solutions that contain various features such as:
- Portfolio Page: Set up a portfolio containing things like pricing per service, project showcase, history on the site (ie took successful jobs, their rating as a service providers, etc.), list of skills, and more
- Job Board: A list of jobs typically posted by potential customers, this job board generally has a bunch of topics ranging from app development to content writing. Customers can also post things like their budget, how much they’ve spent on the site with other freelancers - to judge how serious they are, and customers can also have a profile that proves how “legitimate” they are, or show off what other projects they’ve had done so developers have an idea of their expectations
- Payment Systems: A lot of these sites have some sort of payment system in-place that helps customers pay freelancers, and in turn, help freelancers get paid on time.
- Premium Services: Often times these sites are free to use, but have premium features that are for sale for customers and/or freelancers. Some of these premium features include: bidding for jobs (limited bids for free, freelancers can pay for more), premium job listing (appear at the top of search results)
Services we’ve used include: Guru.com, Freelancer.com, Craigslist, and Kijiji

Segment 2 - Our Experience w/ Freelancer Online Services

Guru.com
- We’ve applied to a few jobs on Guru without much success, however, we have had success via our portfolio on the site
- Once we listed our skills and experience on there, we generated a few leads from people contacting us right from our portfolio page
Freelancer.com
- This was the first freelancing site that we tried, it seemed really popular and active so we went in head first
- We tried starting with smaller jobs, $100 or less, and ended up scoring a low-cost small adjustment job which ended up being an entire mess of a situation - mostly because the customer had an issue with his account and because we didn’t take a look at how Freelancer charges for their services
Kijiji & Craigslist
- In the very beginning we tried to get some free advertising going in the “classifieds” space
- We took a look at what other people were posting on there in the web development space, most were quick $500 or less websites that were all-in
- Following in their footsteps we released a few different ads at different pricepoints, listing similar packages on our website
- This resulted in one long-term customer relationship from a person that called us from the ad, but wanted general development services - not the package that we had advertised
- We also got a call or two from people that wanted extravagant websites for extremely cheap, being offered $100CAD for an entire restaurant website at one point
- Craigslist did not result in any leads, only Kijiji in our experience

Segment 3 - Creating Projects

This was a very important step for us as it gave us skills and portfolio work that we could then show potential clients
We created Chrome Apps, Chrome Extensions giving us a niche area of focus
Web templates and snippets have us experience with basic html and css
Not only can projects potentially generate revenue if monetized but they refine and showcase many soft and hard skills such as project management and coding style
A big thing for us is looking at projects as a potential revenue generators but with a worst case outcome of being a portfolio item that presents and refines our skills
For us we always needed to keep the the timelines on these projects very tight otherwise we would get sidetracked and lose focus
- For Clicks to Riches we finished it within a week of intensive work
- For Html All The Things it was also only a couple weeks
- A project like Content Collector which has not been finished and is fully on the backburner suffered from loose timelines
The chrome app projects that we did directly affected getting our biggest client
Another flaw that we have when it comes to this is being hesitant to create a project:
- Based on how many similar solutions to something are out there
- Not knowing the audience well enough

Web News - Updates vs Stability

What do users prefer when it comes to their applications or operating systems receiving updates.
- Having the same version for long periods of time with no features added or optimizations made but great stability
- Having new features and optimizations every month or so but have the chance to lose stability
An example of fairly stable consistent operating systems with minimal updates would be iOS and partially android.
- They usually receive one large update a year with only minor security updates in between almost like a hybrid system
Windows on the other hand will receive updates almost weekly that seem to be fairly untested and large updates also come multiple times a year and have the potential to introduce massive issues like with the last large scale fall update deleting a users documents folder
Updates to platforms can also cause problems such as Webflow or Wordpress releasing updates which makes features and plugins behave differently.

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Cross-Platform Web Development

28 november 2018 | 84 min

Matt's freshly back from vacation to discuss developing for multiple platforms using various tools such as Apache Cordova, React Native, and Ionic. Allowing developers to use what they're familiar with, and still make apps for a variety of platforms.

Segment 1 - When to Use/Not Use Cross-Platform Development

Cross Platform Web Development allows you to build apps in Javascript that you can then use as native apps on iOS, Android and even Windows
This allows developers that are already familiar with JavaScript to great native experiences without having to learn new languages
In some cases, like with Apache Cordova a team can use one single code base with some hooks for different platforms to build their application for the web, android and ios
This allows for more agile development and smaller development teams as you don’t have resources tied up in native app development
This issues arise when needing to perform complex multimedia tasks like constantly playing audio and video
As we’ve experienced heavy media tasks can cause crashes in webviews where native code might perform just fine
Just beware when decided to go with cross platform development because you can never simulate the performance of a native application, so if buttery smooth animations and lightening quick load actions are important to you, the native way is prefered
For a small business though, like a bakery or restaurant, if they want an application that resembles their website then using a cross platform framework is ideal because it can save them money and give them the functionality they desire

Segment 2 - Cross-Platform Technologies

Apache Cordova
- https://cordova.apache.org/
- Its free and open source
- A plugin that allows you to create native applications out of standard website code (HTML, JS, CSS)
- Provides developers the opportunity to create only one main code base for all platform
- Also the main advantages of cross platform technologies are they give you the ability to create a offline mode and access native api’s such as push notifications, file systems, etc
- It is necessary to create hooks that change how the application loads depending on if it’s on the web or if it's packaged as a native application
React Native and Nativescript with Vue.js
- https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
- https://www.nativescript.org/vue
- Both of these frameworks allow for development on both Android and iOS
- They use a very similar structure to their corresponding technologies with some minor differences when it comes to views, as xml is used to construct layouts
- Both use JS as their scripting language
- These frameworks allow developers that a familiar with React or Vue to build Native applications that perform very close to their Obj C or Java counterparts
Ionic
- https://ionicframework.com/
- Allows you to make web apps into desktop applications for both MacOS and Windows

Segment 3 - Progressive Web Apps

These are websites or web applications that with minor adjustments give the user native functionality straight for the browser
This doesn’t require you to have to build the application and package it for a specific platform (i.e Android, iOS), the newest browsers, safari and chrome both can auto detect if you have a progressive web app in the browser and the prompt the user of the functionality
To create a PWA there are only a few steps required:
- Site has to be HTTPS secured
- Page need to be responsive for mobile devices
- Page needs to use Service Workers to load URLS offline
  - A service work is a background script that can be created and tied to your webpage but which does not have access to your DOM elements
  - Through the service worker you can access the native API’s of you desired system like push notifications
  - They can also be used to process parallel tasks as service workers run on their own threads (cores)
- A Web App Manifest file which allows you to put information and image data for adding your application right to the users home screen on their device (like a real application)
- The site must be able to load ‘fast’ on a 3G connection
https://www.pwabuilder.com/
- Really interesting utility that allows you put in your websites URL and gives you a list of steps plus helps you create the necessary changes to make it a PWA
PWA’s I’ve used
- Twitter has a really good PWA, allowing you to not have to worry about installing another application
- Telegram message application has a good PWA that work on both PC and Mobile

Web News - Strict Learning

Disclaimer: We are not education experts in any way, we discussed this and wrote the notes below based on our personal experiences.
Schools seem to want you to do it right the first time, or risk losing marks, time, or electronic components in the case of our college labs
Meanwhile actual learning is supposed to be filled with mistakes and experimenting so that you can figure out what works and what doesn’t
Example: In college, we would receive a new set of components for our labs that would be conducted throughout the semester, however, we would receive a limited set of components - sometimes with spares, sometimes we’d only have one of each
- You could purchase more if they were in stock, but that’s expensive for a student
- These components are generally cheap electronic components - yet we were expected not to break them, or have a bunch of DOA components
- This discouraged messing around with circuits and caused a lot of checking over and over to ensure your circuit was correct before hooking it up to power
When we learn new web technologies we typically end up setting it up incorrectly a few times, and have plethora of errors throughout the process as we figure out how things should be working.
- This type of learning I find personally the best for understanding what you’re doing and what you can/can’t do with a piece of technology, however, this could get you docked valuable marks in school
The counter argument is that you should make all your mistakes before the test, however, in college especially, those “in-between” marks can add up to 10% or more of your overall grade depending on the class.

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Front-End Developer Roadmap

21 november 2018 | 101 min

Developing with Vue.js, Node.js, and MongoDB

14 november 2018 | 70 min

We've been hard at work, learning a new development stack on which the HTML All The Things website is built.

Note: Matt is on vacation for 1.5 weeks, this episode has been pre-recorded before his departure, some things that were discussed may have a different status (hopefully complete) upon the release of the episode.

Segment 1 - VueJS Frontend Development

Due to the nature of VueJS, we spun up an entirely new development environment
Switching from Notepad++ to Visual Studio Code w/ the Vetur plugin
Some of the most valuable/used parts of VueJS that we used include:
- Components - are like small pieces that makeup the website, placed in separate files and used over and over again, can be imported into each other (component inside a component)
- Scoped Stylesheets - limit the styles you're applying to the file you're writing them in, we limited many styles to specific components, allows you to use the same classnames and ids with completely different properties
Dynamic data was the most challenging part of using VueJS, not from a technical perspective, but more so from a procedural standpoint - not used to having them as apart of my workflow
Vuex, Vue Router, Axios
- Vuex is a state management solution in vue that allows all components to share data between each other
- We use it for storing our loggedIn status for our editing content
- Vue router is used for handling any routes so that we can navigate around our site

Segment 2 - Nodejs and MongoDB Backend Development

Nodejs
- Used as our server to serve webpage content from the Mongo Database and store content in the mongo database
- The server has be handle many calls to it that request things like:
  - Get all content
  - Get content of a specific type
  - Add content of a specific type
  - Delete content
  - Authentication
- These are standard server requests but still took some time to setup as we’ve never hooked in vue.js into Node, usually use the built in templating engines
MongoDB
- A alternative to sql that stores objects in json blocks
- Has great hookins into Nodejs using the Mongoose package
- Used to store our content block data and admin user account for editing the site
- Had to implement mongo admin and database users so that even if our site is hacked they can’t delete or modify the entire mongo database

Segment 3 - Digital Ocean and Docker Deployment

Digital Ocean provides a vps with an already installed Docker instance.
Docker is a way to create small virualizable containers for each technology in your stack
In our case we used docker to create 3 containers:
- Nginx - serve static files and proxy routes to Nodejs server
- Nodejs - run our server infrastructure
- MongoDB - runs our mondodb server that communicates with Nodejs
Had to learn how to create a docker compose file which is a configuration file for building your containers together and letting them know how to communicate
Everything is launched and built through a SSH into your digital ocean server. You have to be familiar with using a Command Line Interface (CLI)

Web News - Wrapping it Up

In this Web News we had a discussion regarding our current status (at the time of recording) in the development of the HTML All The Things website, as well as what to complete for deployment.

Gathering Project Scope & Requirements

7 november 2018 | 83 min

Getting details from your customers can be a challenging experience, but it is vital so that you can deliver a complete produce on time.

Segment 1 - The Contact

There are a lot of way that customers can contact you
Some clients want to be hands-on, some want to hand over everything to you - the professional, and others get right to the point
Despite how many details these customers give you, every project has a unique spin on it, even if it seems run of the mill, this makes it vital that your communication is on point
Sometimes you need to resist customers requests/demands in order to deliver a complete and quality product (ie refusing to move forward on a project that hasn't had enough details communicated to begin accurately)

Segment 2 - Gather Project Requirements

Before sending the first quote we need to know what the client needs us to do
Ensure that you ask the right questions to get all the information you need, clients generally don't know how many details you need

When we work on a small business site some of the sample questions we might ask include:

How do your current clients find you?
If you have a site currently, what are some things you like about it, what are the things you really don't like
What is the intention with the new site, generate leads? Just a digital business card/a way to for people to find your phone number?
Who are your biggest competitors? And which of their sites do you like the most?
Do you have a database of products you want displayed on the site?
Do you want to be able to edit the main components of the site yourself?
How important is the google rank to you?
Do you see your website expanding in some way? Becoming a web app? Or growing a lot? Having a team of editors?

Generally you should gather details over a personal meeting or screen share
After gathering the details you can start creating the basis of the project including details on time to completion and what will be required
This is a major component in your quote for a client

Segment 3 - Changing Project Requirements

Changes can suddenly happen, even in the middle of a project
They can be brought on by customer preferences, market conditions, or company-wide strategy changes of some sort
When a project requirement changes, especially when it drastically changes from the original vision, it often falls to you as the creator to make the appropriate changes
It’s important to have a layout of what you’re willing to do with a client before you begin any work and to have a similar layout for what you're willing to do about changes that arise

Web News - What do yo want from a phone/Android launcher?

We all have different needs and wants from our mobile devices, they’re an extension of us and the main way the people communicate with one another these days
With that being said, they’re still mobile computers and can be used for a wide variety of tasks from working on the go, taking photos, chatting with friends, and much more.
With different use cases comes a variety of user preferences in terms of hardware and software
Are you a fan of Android fragmentation, or is there too much variation?

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Responsive Design

31 oktober 2018 | 81 min

Responsive design has revolutionized how websites are developed, but static layouts still have their place. We explore these two different layout methods in this episode of the podcast.

Reference from Treehouse: https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/which-page-layout

Segment 1 - What is Responsive Design?

Responsive design responds to its environment, in the case of web design it’s specifically referring to how a website’s user interface responds to different window sizes and technologies available.
This gives us the ability to have a single design that changes and adapts to various devices from ultrawide PC displays, down to older smartphones.
It also allows users to make the most of the screen real estate they have
Responsive design makes the use of a variety of tactics that are generally found in CSS including: media queries, relative positioning, relative length units, whitespace
- Having two browsers snapped to each side of a 1080p display for more information, rather than always having a webpage open at full resolution
Responsive design makes the use of a variety of tactics that are generally found in CSS including: media queries, relative positioning, relative length units, whitespace

Segment 2 - How to Implement Responsive Design

CSS Responsive Tactics:
- Media Queries
  - Offer breakpoints to a design, allowing developers to apply design changes at a specific breakpoint, such as a certain max-width (probably most popular breakpoint)
- Relative Positioning
  - Position: relative;
  - Positioning absolute elements within a relative container and then controlling that relative container to automatically move the elements within the container
- Relative Length Units
  - Units that allow your elements to be responsive. These units are dynamic and change based on their environment
  - Unlike exact, or absolute length units which are (cm, mm, px, etc.)
  - 3 examples:
    - rem - relative to the font-size of the root element
    - % - relative to the parent element
    - Vw - relative to 1% of the width of the viewport
  - Reference link: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_units.asp
- Whitespace
  - The space between elements (ie the space between columns)
  - It’s basically blank space on the web page
  - Responsive design uses this as a buffer zone to move elements around various elements
  - Filling a site up too much (minimal whitespace) requires space for elements to be displaced and the site will become too crowded on smaller screens (infinite scrolling, or a lot of pagination)
Main high-level CSS responsive tactics include: Flexbox, CSS Grid
Mobile or Large screen first design?
- It seems currently it’s more popular to design for mobile first and then create media queries for larger displays
  - This is useful if you are also designing for older browsers and want to use newer technologies like Grid of even Flexbox
  - Older browsers will see a mobile design (one column) while any larger screen or new browser can utilize the newer technology for a more advanced/easier to set up layout
- Traditionally we design for larger screen and adapted for mobile/smaller
  - This is still viable depending again on your audience, an older audience for example still prefers larger screens

Segment 3 - When to use Static instead of Responsive Design

Static layouts/static design is when the page is laid out in a fixed way
The elements on the page do not adjust to the screen resolution, or window changing size, generally, overflow is used in order to scroll all around the page
Older sites, especially those that appear left aligned and not fullscreen are done in a static layout, as they’re typically 640px or 800px wide and remain left aligned, if the screen shrinks below this point, as with a phone screen, the user must scroll around the design
Elements are generally not optimized for all platforms, which results in very small buttons, and text on high definition and mobile phone screens
Modern Static Design or Static Layouts
- We’ve experiences situations in which a single device, or a single type of monitor will be used, adding responsivity in any way would add additional development and testing time and obviously cost more money
- With a single screen in mind you can use the space at your disposal more effectively, have content blocks that perfects fill any available whitespace (within reason) and take advantage of any unique characteristics (ie notch)
- Industrial equipment is often like this, when they use a technology called PLCs to control them, generally an HMI (Human Machine Interface) is required to control it via a touch screen, with the web steadily expanding it’s not outrageous to assume that one day a browser version of an HMI may be used on these touch screens, which are all one specific size and don’t update like consumer products (remain the same for years, even decades)
When we first got into business we set out with the idea that we’d never make a static layout, all our websites were going to be mobile-friendly and responsive
- Even a few years ago when we opened, there was a lot of production websites that had either a static layout, or had a separate mobile site
- Today responsivity is the way to go and is generally cheaper and less clunky than an entire mobile website
- We wouldn’t recommend making something with a static layout unless it has a very specific fixed set of parameters that need to be met, or if it will exclusively be used on a specific display for years to come

Web News - Early Access Software/Games

Potential Issues:
- Developers don’t want the pressure of saying that it is version 1.0 because of the assumed amount of polish
- The developer getting paid and receiving free bug testing while in early access/beta doesn’t seem fair to the user/customer that is buying it
- The potential that you could pay for something but it never gets fully released
- Even if something is free but in beta like flutter.io a cross platform framework for android and iOS. It could be abandoned, and your efforts can be for nothing in learning it and helping with its feature development/bug fixing
Potential Benefits:
- The user can feel part of the development and evolving process of the software and when/if it is released will be more attached to the product
- Strapped for cash but talented developers have a chance to maybe release a MVP and work on it while receiving feedback and funding from the people using it
- A longer update cycle for applications/games because of constant funding
- User feedback can lead to new features and improvements as the system is not yet complete and it is easier to add/change something in this state

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Developer to CTO w/ Azhar Zuberi

24 oktober 2018 | 112 min

We sit down with Azhar Zuberi to discuss his unique professional journey from developer to CTO of a startup.

Segment 1 - Introduce Yourself

Segment 2 - A little backstory

What would you say was the most important topic or lesson you learned in your schooling when it comes to being a developer?
How important was your first job as a developer in defining your coding style/knowledge base?
When first starting out what were the ‘popular’ technologies that you learned (i.e. angular, bootstrap, wordpress etc)

Segment 3 - Our connection

What was the reason you decided to choose us (Digital Dynasty Design) when we first started working together?
What is your workflow/process for working with and hiring off site/outsourced developers?
What are the benefits of having a small development team versus increasing funding and hiring a full staff?
What are some of the biggest challenges when have a off site/outsourced development team?
Our current development process has us using a very base Jquery, Bootstrap, JS, HTML and CSS stack. What were some of the reasons behind this vs using a more robust framework i.e. angular or react?

Segment 4 - Running a company

What are some additional responsibilities that you were not expecting when transitioning to being a CTO
What do you miss most about being just a contract developer
As CTO how important was it to have all those technical skills and years of work in a company and as a contractor
How did you learn the business side of your role as CTO and what is the most challenging part for you?

Web News - Incomplete Ecosystems

What is an ecosystem?
- A collection of software - typically from the same manufacturer - that all compliment each other
- A primary example would be iCloud storing all your contacts and other data from your iPhone for use on your Mac, or on a new iPhone if you need to sync them up
Ecosystems have been a key part of people’s workflow for the past few years
They’re often a key feature that people look for when they purchasing a device
- Apple’s ecosystem stands out in this particular example
There are a lot of ecosystems out there including: productivity, smarthome, etc.
Examples of incomplete ecosystems (rough notes/points of reference):
- Samsung has software primarily on the phone, such as Notes, Bixby, Email, etc. but has no clients for PC use, other than things that mirror or use the phone (ie SideSync)
- Microsoft’s is more focused on productivity (email, contacts, calendar, Cortana), but has no focus on smart home functionality (ie hardware). Windows Phone hardware is basically dead and therefore there is no mobile experience for Windows, with the exception of Android apps (which is a decent solution - but not as integrated as first party)
- Android has no full desktop experience (A Pixelbook doesn’t have all the pro software that Windows has, Google Assistant is on Google hardware, but not on Windows 10)

You can find Azhar via...

Contentlinq Website - www.contentlinq.com

Contact Email - success@contentlinq.com

LinkedIn - Profile Page

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Communicating with Customers

17 oktober 2018 | 71 min

Communicating with your customers is a difficult, yet necessary part of doing business. In this episode we discuss best practices when dealing with various types of customers.

Segment 1 - Establishing Channels

Establishing which channels you're willing to talk on is critical
Steer new customers to the proper channels that you check regularly (ie email, Twitter DM, phone call, etc.) so that you don't miss out on potential business
Make sure that you check your unused channels on occasion (maybe weekly) in order to ensure nobody has reached out to you on those channels mistakenly and steer them towards the channels that you do use
Steering customers to the correct channels is as easy as stating which communication method you prefer in meetings, in your social media bio/profile, or starting the conversation on your method of choice (if you're starting the conversation)

Segment 2 - Different Types of Communicators

As you work with clients you will start to understand how they work, but more importantly how they communicate and what they generally expect
Some clients are entirely hands-off, while others want to be updated whenever something small is done
There’s no clear cut way to determine which type of communicator your client is, other than working with them and slowly learning their expectations, just as you would with a friend, we all contact different friends in different ways depending on how we’ve communicated with them in the past
Some people are more face-to-face oriented and want in-person meeting more than emails or messaging, while others just want quick messages, emails
It’s important that you don’t necessarily go way out of the way for people (ie doing in-person meetings for something that a single email would deal with)

Segment 3 - Dos and Don'ts

Dos
- Establish a timeframe for a customer to contact you. Can be different between customers. Also take into account time zones and try to use them to your benefit to split up your day between customers.
  - Use that timeframe to do callbacks as well if you miss a call
- Being prompt and consistent in your communications
- Be professional and don’t use needless slang, but keep in mind that as your relationship with the customer builds you can be more friendly and approachable
- Take responsibility for missed communication
  - If you forget to answer an email and your customer reminds you make sure to apologize and try not to make excuses
Don’ts
- Don’t neglect answering just because you feel the customer won’t like what you have to say. Be upfront and honest
- Don’t answer customers emails right when they come in everytime, pick a time or a few set times a day when you answer emails. Obviously use discretion as some situations can be urgent
- Don’t put yourself in situations where you will be overwhelmed with communications and all your accounts will suffer

Web News - Social Overload

Social media is the vehicle that drives traffic to most online projects, with so many social media networks out there it can easily become a project just to keep up with posting new material, let alone making said material
Phones manufacturers and other apps are now tracking usage on various apps, letting people know when they’re using their phone a lot - watching too much YouTube for example
Social media, and especially our mobile devices have in a way made us “addicts” to social media and other apps since we can now access them everywhere
Work on the parts of social media that you want to work out, make sure you put work into your craft, but you can’t excel at everything
- IGTV content idea
- Making content out of a single piece of content (ie get an article, photo for instagram, and an opinion tweet out of a single design idea)

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UX Considerations

10 oktober 2018 | 111 min

We dive into the world of UX in this episode, analyzing some basic tactics you can use to ensure that your users have a great experience on your site or app!

UX Rules

Source: https://theblog.adobe.com/15-rules-every-ux-designer-know/

UX is not (only) UI
- User Interface is a part of User Experience
- Are glitches part of UX?
Know your audience
- User research is a natural first step in the design process
- Designing a site for a specific industry will very much influence your decisions.
You are not the user
- Testing with real users is an essential part of the design process
- Many examples where we thought something was simple but a small test group immediately got confused
Adapt design for short attention spans
- Don’t overwhelm users with too much information
- Short blocks of text because people don’t read
- Keep interactions quick, don’t make people fill out massive forms
The UX process isn’t set in stone
- Adapt your design process for the product you design
- Designing a small one page site for a small business is drastically different than a ecommerce website
Prototype before you build a real product
- The design phase for digital products should include a prototyping stage
- We always make at least a wireframe to show the interactions and pages to clients so they know at a high level what the experience will be
- For larger clients a full clickthrough mockup can be made before any development begins to iron out all misunderstandings and conflicts
Use real content when designing
- Avoid Lorem Ipsum and dummy placeholders
- Our customers have been confused before asking what is this “gibberish” in reference to lorem ipsum
- Also confused as to why the pictures are different then what he had in mind when we use generic stock photos
Keep things simple and consistent
- The hallmark of a great user interface is simplicity and consistency
- For example I find it confusing when a one page scroll website has a navigation that then opens up a different page. Don’t combine the two.
Recognition over recall
- Showing users elements they can recognize improves usability versus needing to recall items from scratch
- People know what buttons look like and usually know to click them, same with links and form inputs. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel
Make design usable and accessible
- Design for a diverse set of users that will interact with your products
- Keep in mind that some users are color blind or even blind so make sure to follow the accessibility guidelines
Don’t try to solve a problem yourself
- Design is team sport — don’t work in isolation
Don’t try to solve everything at once
- Design is an iterative process
Preventing errors is better than fixing them
- Whenever possible, design products to keep potential errors to a minimum
Offer informative feedback
- An app or website should always keep users informed about what is going on
- Transitions are a great way to show what is happening without holding the users hand
Avoid dramatic redesigns
- Remember Weber’s Law of Just Noticeable Differences
- Example digg redesign killed the site

Web News - Microsoft

Latest windows update has a chance to delete your user files without a chance at recovery
Randomly corrupted hard drives
Unskippable updates
Windows store
Troubleshooting steps are ridiculous

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New! - Reddit

Bootcamp to Web Developer w/ David Lindahl

3 oktober 2018 | 97 min

Box, Flexbox, and Grid

26 september 2018 | 90 min

We dive into the different CSS layout methods that have evolved over recent years including box model, flexbox, and grid.

Segment 1 - Layout Models

StackChief reference article
Box Model
- Elements comprise of: content, padding, border, margin
- Dimensions like height and width
- Floats and clearfix
- CSS Box Model - W3Schools article
Flexbox
- Evolution of the box model
- Comprises of a container element called the flex container, which "control" their child elements called flex items
- Flexbox is fantastic for responsive layouts
- 1 dimensional layouts
CSS Grid
- New CSS layout method that is supported in the latest version of major browsers (IE doesn't have support)
- 2 dimensional layouts
- Can customize every property of the grid
  - # of rows and columns
  - size of row in various metrics (px, %, vh, vw, auto)
  - spacing between rows and columns
- Very clean code - no need for row and column containers

Segment 2 - Box vs Flexbox vs Grid

Responsivity
- Box, flexbox, and grid can all be used to make responsive layouts
- Many of our production websites are still in box layout, they still work without issue on modern browsers and devices
Layouts
- Basic sites can use any of the layout models
- Site components (ie navbar) can be made easily with flexbox due to their one dimensional layout
- Full site structures are easier to make with CSS grid due to two dimensional column and row functionality
Easy of Use
- Matt believes the box model is easiest to learn - especially when learning how web pages flow
  - Box model is more human readable, whilst flexbox allows for more complex layouts with less code and micromanaging
Links
- Box Model - https://caniuse.com/#feat=inline-block
- Flexbox - https://caniuse.com/#search=flex

Web News - 'Unobtrusive Ads'

Ad strategies - which are you ok with?
- Sponsored posts
- Banner ads (Google Ads, etc.)
- Full page timed ads
- Sidebar ads
- Chumbox (From around the web, recommended for you)
What are some ad strategies that annoy you?
Do you think ads on a web page or app are a fair way to monetize? (freemium ad supported)
Do you care what companies' ads are served to you? (ie you don't like Coke but like Pepsi)

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CSS Transitions & Animations

19 september 2018 | 84 min

In this episode we focus on CSS transitions and animations, what they are, why they both exist, and when you should use one or the other.

Segment 1 - Transitions vs Animations

AdobePress Article - reference link
Transitions
- Only have two states (triggered and not triggered)
- Always run forward when triggered, and backwards when the trigger is removed
- Common triggers are: hover, link, active, visited, focus, checked, disabled
- Common use case: hover over a button and have the box shadow get darker as long as the cursor is hovering over it
Animations
- More control than transitions
- Can start, stop, pause, run forwards, run backwards
- Complex animations are possible by manipulating various properties within keyframes
- May be more difficult to manipulate with Javascript
Use animations if you need the complexity
Use transitions if you have a simple affect that only needs two states (triggered, not triggered)

Segment 2 - How Transitions and Animations Improve UX

Build your site with animations in mind so they don't look tacked on after the fact
Don't be too flashy - your animations need to have purpose, shouldn't get in the way of the user experience
Don't overwhelm the user with animations - may cause performance issues, can distract the user
Keep animations consistent with the associated action - swipes with sliding animation, taps w/ pebble drop in water animation

Segment 3 - Performance

Too many transitions or complex animations can cause serious performance issues
The browser runs animations better over time (device starts to dedicate resources to the tab, cache builds up) so tests need to be done on a fresh incognito (or equivalent) window to ensure performance is good for first time users
Test on older devices that may have slow hardware, or may have older browsers due to lack of support for newer updates
Performance "hacks" - translate3d, translatez
- More modern method "will-change"
- Check out José Rosário’s page on Medium article: https://medium.com/outsystems-experts/how-to-achieve-60-fps-animations-with-css3-db7b98610108 for an in-depth breakdown

Segment 4 - Animation Frameworks

Three.js
- Dependant on WebGL
- Full 3D render capable
- Is complex to start with
- has been around now for 8+ years so a little bit bloated yet still supported
Anime.js
- Fastest/best performance large scale animation library
- Extremely lightweight
- Could replace Three.js due to simplicity and modern architecture
ScrollReveal.js
- Specific library for animation while scrolling
- Using specific libraries for certain tasks maskes code more lightweight
- Usually easier to implement then a larger more customizable library

Web News - Inconsistencies and Separation

Mobile versions (app or mobile site) vs Desktop versions (apps or site)
Separation of apps (multiple apps - same service/function)
Inconsistent development features in an ecosystem

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