Bocoup

So, You’d Like to Start an Open Source Project

Mike Pennisi — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:56:44 +0000

Regular readers of this blog are no strangers to free and open source software. From Firefox to Brave, Node.js to OpenSSL, and jQuery to React (finally), today’s web developer can’t get very far at all without relying on “FOSS.” However, there is a huge difference between consuming FOSS and maintaining FOSS. The latter task is […]

I Slipped on JavaScript’s Banana Peel

Mike Pennisi — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 19:48:10 +0000

Think of the last time you goofed up on the job. Maybe you forgot to clean out the microwave in the break room. Maybe you hit “Reply All” when you really meant “Reply.” Or maybe you nodded off during an all-hands meeting. Probably your mistake was a little less banal than any of that, but […]

Ergonomic Testing with Webpack, Part One, File Resolving

Z Goddard — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 10:00:42 +0000

This is part one in a series on the intersection of module bundlers and testing frameworks. Our focus will be webpack and jest but the techniques explored here can be reused with other tools as well. Modern websites and applications are routinely built by combining hundreds of small JavaScript modules. In order to increase the […]

Moving forward with the Open Web

Jory Burson — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:00:20 +0000

We’re announcing some big changes to our teams and a new focus area for Bocoup. First, we have made the difficult decision to close our design and data visualization services in order to plant deeper roots as an open web engineering company. As a result, many of our teammates have moved on to pursue other […]

The Next Steps For TC39

Leo Balter — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 16:34:31 +0000

It’s been more than an year since I started attending TC39 meetings, and this most recent meeting felt much like the first, as I faced a new personal challenge: I went there as the acting chair. TC39 is a group of almost 50 highly skilled professionals, each with very strong positions on the existing form […]

The Caper of the Flaky Test

Mike Pennisi — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 19:54:15 +0000

The test showed up on my desk just like any other. There I was, working with Google’s Web Platform Predictability team to find so-called “flaky” tests in the venerable Web Platform Tests project. I’d run a hundred or so at a time, over and over again, looking for any that reported inconsistent results. It was […]

Accessibility for Robots

Mike Pennisi — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 16:57:22 +0000

Maybe you’re not a “people person.” It’s not that you dislike other humans, but you recognize certain realities of your work. Your day job is maintaining a web application, after all, not carousing with your users. You know that accessibility is an important topic, but you haven’t been able to find the time to learn […]

Agile Methods for Tackling Technical Debt

Matt Surabian — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 18:55:14 +0000

Managing technical debt is such an important part of software development we include this goal in every contract we send out: Reduce or eliminate technical debt. All complex projects accumulate some form of technical debt. In extreme cases, it can cause project velocity to slow to a crawl. In this post we’ll review a few […]

Getting Started with Shiny

Jim Vallandingham — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 21:31:30 +0000

Do you know a bit of R and have some data you need to visualize quickly? In this blog post we take a look at Rstudio’s Shiny package and the first steps toward creating a working interactive to explore your data with it. What is Shiny? Shiny is a framework to develop web-based frontends for […]

See You JavaScript Cowboy…

Mike Pennisi — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 09:04:55 +0000

To say that “Cowboy” Ben Alman has a knack for automation would be an understatement. For proof, look no further than his legendary “dotfiles” repository, meticulously crafted to initialize computers to his exact specifications. But this is really only half of the picture. For as long as we’ve known him, Ben has been generalizing those […]