jQuery.waitFor plugin

Sometimes jQuery(document).ready() isn’t fast enough. It doesn’t do anything until the entire DOM has loaded. But sometimes you want your code to run against your DOM elements immediately rather than waiting until the rest of the page DOM is done. You can do this with jQuery.waitFor, a new plugin. Usage waitFor uses jQuery’s Deferred API, […]

Posted on: 1 April 2013 | 10:07 pm

Making Things Happen

Scott Berkun offers a great excerpt from his book Making Things Happen. He views project management as basically managing priorities: Everything can be represented in an ordered list. Most of the work of project management is correctly prioritizing things and leading the team in carrying them out. The three most basic ordered lists are: project […]

Posted on: 19 April 2012 | 7:26 pm

Adobe Refresh 2012

Last month I attended Adobe’s Refresh 2012 event. This is a roadshow where they present highlights from the current and upcoming product line for designers and developers. They talked about the future of Flash and their product strategy, and they showed some very neat tools. Refresh 2012 in Auckland was held at the gracious Rialto […]

Posted on: 16 April 2012 | 10:05 pm

Lean Software Development

Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t join the Cult of Done. Wise words from Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck: In 1988 Harold Thimbleby published a paper in IEEE Software titled “Delaying Commitment.” He notes that when faced with a new situation, experts will delay firm decisions while they investigate the […]

Posted on: 12 February 2012 | 6:27 pm

A spoonful of Git helps the Subversion go down

Here’s how I use Git to work on projects that use Subversion for version control. The basic idea is to use the Git master branch to track the Subversion trunk. All my coding happens on Git branches. That way I can use Git to easily work on multiple different features or bugfixes at once, with […]

Posted on: 24 January 2012 | 6:50 pm

HTML5 — Barcamp Auckland 5

The last proper session I went to at Barcamp Auckland 5 was “Extreme AJAX – beyond the hashbang, building a robust single page JS framework and URL schema”, presented by Barry Hannah (@barryhannah) & Mark Zeman (@markzeman). They worked on the excellent newzealand.com redesign and gave some insight into its engineering. At a high level, […]

Posted on: 21 July 2011 | 3:28 pm

Development productivity — Barcamp Auckland 5

Last weekend’s Barcamp Auckland unconference had social issues, comedy and politics, but of course no Barcamp would be complete without a heapin’ helping of software development geekery. Mal Curtis (@snikchnz) gave a packed presentation on Web Development Productivity, subtitled “What I use to quickly develop, deploy and maintain html, css, js, php & ruby code […]

Posted on: 21 July 2011 | 7:34 am

Society — Barcamp Auckland 5

I attended a few sessions at Barcamp Auckland yesterday that concerned the Internet’s role in society. Vikram Kumar (@vikram_nz) and (@robertobrien) hosted a discussion about designing privacy into services and products. This was a wide-ranging talk — I learned about a few interesting projects. Fire Eagle, from Yahoo!, is a framework for building location-awareness into […]

Posted on: 17 July 2011 | 4:24 am

The Pomodoro Technique — Barcamp Auckland 5

The Pomodoro Technique is a way of managing your time for improved productivity. At Barcamp Auckland 5 today, Carol Green (@carolgreen) and Noemi Selisker (@thenoemi) gave a useful outline of the process, from a beginner’s point of view — Noemi has been using the technique for a couple of weeks, and Carol is just about […]

Posted on: 16 July 2011 | 6:13 am

Barcamp Auckland 5

About 300 of New Zealand’s brightest gathered in Auckland today for the Barcamp Auckland 5 unconference. As with BCA4 last year, it was all pretty well-organised for an unconference, though there was an unsettling lack of espresso coffee. There was good variety in the various sessions I attended. One was on 1Password, a cross-platform password […]

Posted on: 16 July 2011 | 6:07 am