The last two days I spent at the excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf. It was my second time after being in Berlin in 2017. As always I took notes on my phone, so autosuggest may have introduced some errors. Some videos are already up if you want to see the complete talks. If you can, go to one of those conferences! The speakers are exceptional and it has a very familiar feeling being there. Thanks to Marc Thiele for running this each year!
This week Kara Swisher did an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Twitter. As it (unsurprisingly) turns out, it was hard to follow this interview.
The 8th edition of the Wherecamp took place in Berlin again. It's my first time at this conference focused on mapping and location. Many interesting talks give an overview on current trends and topics. Here are my notes and highlights.
Sarah Jeong writes on The Verge that she got a Tamagotchi recently and realized that all the meaningless beeping and button pushing reminds her of our smartphone usage today. We got trained into responding and taking care of each notification.
Cryptocurrencies are a real hype right now. Everyone jumps on board, hoping to make some money. I tested it out, too, to understand it a bit more. But it doesn’t feel right — so I sold my few coins and quit. Here are my doubts and reasons for feeling uncomfortable with those currencies.
The last two days I spend in Berlin at the fantastic Beyond Tellerrand conference. The talks and people there are great, you should definitely go to one of those events. I took some notes during the talks on my phone. Autosuggest errors may be included. Check out the recorded talks in case you want the full experience.
Mapbox GL JS is a JavaScript library that uses WebGL to render interactive maps from vector tiles and Mapbox styles. In a recent update Mapbox added extended functionality to create 3D data visualizations on ...
The Fucking Open Web is a post by Eran Hammer about the complexity and unpredictability of the web in contrast to native applications. And as much as I love the web for it’s openness, I totally have to agree.
In the early days of the internet it was pretty simple — publish a site and it was done. With social media user generated content became the norm and the amount of data exploded. In the opinion of the big social networks it apparently is too much for the majority of users to handle.
Graphs and charts can be build using SVG or the DOM. But doing this by hand is quite annoying and repetitive. Luckily, there is a library to help: D3.js makes manipulating the DOM based on data easy.
We often use the word mobile device when talking about limitations while designing and building a new application or website. But what do we mean with that? What is a mobile device and what makes it so special that we have to care about? Are the problems we refer to limited to smartphones?
For a project which is currently in development, I’d liked to record a video from the webcam data that is available through getUserMedia. That’s how I got to know the MediaRecorder API.
For a Google Maps based project with a lot of similar markers, I was looking for a way to reduce redundancy for these marker images. The marker images look all the same, only differing in the background color. Also there is a gradient and a drop shadow included. That would be a perfect use case for a SVG symbol sprite!
Recently Google released Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open source subset of HTML with performance in mind. What purpose does it serve and do we really need that?
Lately I recognized that the RAM on this server is pretty full. A bit freed up when I removed the Piwik Analytics install recently. But still, it was too full for too little stuff running.
These days everything get’s tracked. Especially on the web, but also more and more in the daily life. Do we move enough? Should I take the stairs? Should I eat some fruits instead of chocolate? People seem to need a tracking app that tells them what to do.
Sometimes one doesn’t want to wait to finish for an asynchronous operation, like a fetch or calculation, to do further actions with that data. Streams are there to help with that. This will be a short introduction into Readable, Transform and Writable streams in Node.js.
When you want to proxy some files in your Go project running on Google App Engine, the standard Go proxy does not work. Instead, App Engine uses a custom implementation for proxies, called urlfetch.
The other day I read an article on The Post-Ownership Society with the subtitle “How the ‘sharing economy’ allows Millennials to cope with downward mobility, and also makes them poorer.”.
Back in November, when traveling through Malaysia, we met a large group of students playing games on the beach on Langkawi. They were quick to ask us if we want to join. As it looked like a lot of fun, we agreed.
From time to time I build some server things in Go. The standard library already comes with a lot of functionality, but sometimes lacks essential features. One of them is a flexible router with parameters.
Some years ago I used a cheap laptop which was quite okay for my use cases back then. From time to time I recognized, that the things that I thought are pretty balanced actually look awful on a high contrast display (the MacBook at work).
ECMAScript 6, the long awaited next iteration of the JavaScript language get’s more and more browser support lately. Also in io.js a lot of the new features are supported. But Node.js is still lacking most of the features.
The Internet started as an open place. It was based around the idea of openness: No matter what tools you’d use, there where some open protocols that defined how to access or exchange content. I’m sure the web would not look the same if it was invented with big players involved, that now dictate what’s happening on the web. Every of these big players tries to keep users in it’s silo.
As I held a talk a while back about React and Flux from Facebook and the topic still pops up every now and then, I’ll write down my experiences on getting started with both. This post handles React, Flux will follow up later. Both are very straight forward, but as they are different than other approaches, it’ll take some time (like minutes) to get used to them.
Already more than two years ago I went for a static blog. One of the reasons was the simplicity and the possibility to write in Markdown. It was fine then, because I did not want to mess around with a clunky CMS such as Wordpress. Half a year later, in May 2013, a Kickstarter campaign totally hit my nerve: a simple blog system, based on Node.js. It’s called Ghost and I was quick to back that! But when a system is running once, it’s hard to switch…
At the Hamburg JavaScript Usergroup I gave a talk on React and Flux from Facebook. I explain the concepts behind these two and point out what's so special about them.
Yesterday I gave talk on how to bring an existing web app to the Firefox Marketplace. Each step is explained on the example of gifalicious, the world class GIF service I built.
With the buzzword HTML5 came a lot of new stuff to the browsers. One of the things I like a lot are the newly introduced input types. In this article I will show what new types are available to use, talk about browser compability and highlight the benefits of using them. I'll show off how each type behaves in a modern browser, on touch and on keyboard based devices.
Modern browsers improved a lot in their performance in recent years but nonetheless there a some things to take care of when writing apps or websites in JavaScript. Performance is important or, as Brad Frost says, performance is design. Your users will appreciate it a lot when the app is performing fast.
Last week I switched the basis of this site: instead of an express powered site, everything is simple static html pages now. Why I did that? There are some reasons for that. I don't update that often, as you probably noticed. The blog was hosted on tumblr before and I preferred to host it on my own server. When I wrote something or uploaded a new photo, I always checked that into my git repository. So it's no different now. Also, this site doesn't contain anything dynamic. Perfect to go static!
It's never a good idea to let doors open. Neither should there be unnecessary open ports on your server. With Iptables, a firewall shipped with Ubuntu, it's not that hard to secure your server. A very detailed and nice introduction can be found in the Ubuntu Wiki.
Since there is php-fpm in Nginx it's save to run PHP applications without an Apache webserver just using Nginx. I'll explain how to set up php-fpm to run your php app. My system runs on Ubuntu 12.04 server and Nginx is already installed and running.
When you design a website these days, make sure to do it responsive. You already heard of this before, I guess. In the article The Best Browser is the One You Have with You you can find a lot of arguments why it's so important.