Web* Advocate [Standard|Perf|A11y|App]
I recently came back to my blog after many years of not posting for various reasons. I've used a combination of Github, Netlify and Eleventy to host my blog for a long time, and it worked really well. However, in September 2023, Netlify announced that they were dropping support for Git LFS because other people did it better. Now in 2025, Git LFS on Netlify has deteriorated, and whilst the blog…
People appear to be in two different camps on the question of "how hard is coding today?". There's a group who keep on the cutting edge of technology (the GraphQL-using, framework-switching bunch who are currently talking up Astro ) and those who don't, or cannot, for many, many different reasons. Whilst I've not gotten around to trying Astro, or Svelte, or even GraphQL, I personally try to keep…
Inside Maersk Technology, we have lots of communities of practice - like-minded individuals who solve problems with technologies. I run the front-end community and have done for about two years. Over time, we've run regular calls, demonstrations and tech talks to help educate the community and keep us up to date with the latest trends. This time, I wanted to go bigger - to run a half day event…
I've been away for 3 weeks and all this happened It's a strange old time. In the middle of lockdown, my wife and I were expecting our second child, though we weren't quite expecting her this early. Two and a bit weeks before her due date, our littlest one arrives and I down tools to help. It's been a wonderful few weeks that I won't forget. It did catch us all off guard though, as I'd been…
Summary In this post, I delve deep into: Library and bundle size, and output, using Rollup, and how tree-shaking doesn't always work A discussion on dependencies, managing them in your library Effectively analysis if the code you have is the right size An aside on browserslist files and their effects Using ES Module builds in webpack when appropriate It all started with a tweet Part of my role at…
I began interviewing people for jobs about three years in to my career. Over the past decade, I've run hundreds of phone interviews, Skype interviews and in-person interviews. Over time, my approach, and what I look for has changed. I've always relied a lot on gut feel, looking for people similar to those who already work for the company (safe bets) or looking for red flags if a candidate does not…
I was lucky enough to go to the Chrome Dev Summit in San Francisco this year. There were a thousand people in the venue, and seven thousand on the wait list, so I'm glad that I could attend in person. You can see all the videos from the talks at CDS 2019 on this playlist Here are my 7 key take-aways from the event The web must get to parity with native Without saying so explicitly, the web must…
The best thing about technology, is that it's always changing. I learn new things every day, even in areas that I think I know a lot about, such as web performance. See, when I was looking at performance optimisations for a project, I found a way to reduce connection times by getting the browser to speculatively perform DNS lookups for a list of third-party domains. This takes about 10-30ms off of…
I've been playing with HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS, I'm late to the party as usual) and there's some misconceptions that I had going in that I didn't know about that threw me a bit. So, here's a no nonsense guide to HSTS. The HSTS Header is pretty simple to implement I actually thought that this would be the hard bit, but actually putting the header in is very simple. As it's domain…
Over the last few months I've been putting together my talk for the year, based on a blog post that is titled "HTTPS is Hard". You can read the full article on the Yell blog on which it is published. There's also an abridged version on Medium . It's been a very long time coming, and has changed over the time I've been writing it, so I thought I'd get down a few reflections on the article. It's…
You may have heard about a project that Google has just announced called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which aims to speed up the mobile web. Publishers around the world use the mobile web to reach these readers, but the experience can often leave a lot to be desired. Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader—and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or…
Dave Letorey at State of the Browser A short write up on the weekend Another year, another State of The Browser - now in its fifth year, it's a conference for the London Web development community. It's aimed at the masses, we want it to be accessible to all and have really great speakers, and this year was no exception to those rules. In its inception, SOTB was a chance for the browser…
I was lucky enough to attend Edge Conf in London this year, a day that I always truly enjoy. The main sessions of the conference were streamed live and videos will be available later, but the break-outs weren't recorded. These were the sessions I enjoyed the most and it's a shame that people won't see them without being there - so here's my notes on what was said to the best of my ability (and…
I've been really interested in wearables since I saw the first press shots of the Moto 360. When wearables first appeared (the Pebble, Galaxy Gear) they were the equivalent of a calculator watch - quite useful for adding things together, but awful at telling the time and even worse for your sex life. They were blocky, had incredibly poor battery life and not something you'd even consider wearing…
I've been off the speaking circuit for a while now. After a successful 2012 and 2013, I let my public speaking take a backseat to focus on my new role at Yell. I'm really happy to have got to a point in this role where I can begin to talk at the work that I'm doing here, and there's a lot that I'm really proud of. Recently I got back up on the stage at Oxford Geek Night to do Yell's first…
Update - this position has now been filled. You can look at all of the jobs available in Digital on the careers website -- I'm looking for a talented junior/graduate developer to come and join my team at Yell. We work exclusively on the Yell.com search engine, dealing with over 20 million users a month. I've got some fantastic senior developers working for me, and we need a junior developer in the…
Removing jQuery from your website is a big thing. We have become so reliant upon it that there are far more JavaScript plugins and modules that rely on it than that don't. You have to be so careful when we try to remove it, or you'll end up losing functionality. We need to plan to remove this code - we need to know what could break when we take jQuery away, and we need to know what holes we will…
I was lucky enough to be invited to attend and speak at Edge Conf London 2014 , an assembly of web development superheroes charged with discussing the future of web technology in front of a live audience. I've written up my main take-aways from the event. Web Components Web Components Panel at EdgeConf 3 Web Components are the custom elements that you've always wanted. If you're after a tag, web…
It's 2014 and I'm feeling inspired to change my ways. In 2014, I want to go jQuery-free ! Before I get started, I want to clear the air and put in a big fat disclaimer about my opinions on jQuery. Here we go: jQuery is an excellent library. It is the right answer for the vast majority of websites and developers and is still the best way to do cross-browser JavaScript. What I am against is the…
Update 4th Feb 2017: I'm looking for a new front-end developer. If you think this could be you, have a look at the front-end developer job description **Update 4th Feb 2014: **I've successfully recruited two new developers to fill these roles, thank you to everyone who has applied. I will update this page as roles become available. **Update 13th August 2014: **I'm looking for another front-end…
I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at Remy Sharp's Side View conference in Brighton this weekend, a part of the full frontal conference event. I tried to give an overview of the state of the web on TVs and how our current attitude to responsive web design works, or rather doesn't work, on big screens. Here's the slides and abstract. [speakerdeck…
It’s official, from the end of November I’m going to be working for hibu as the UI Tech Lead for yell.com I've had a great start to my career – over my 6 years at PA I’ve worked for the biggest employer in Europe (twice), the world’s biggest medical charity, oil giants, financial regulators, one-man-bands, governments, utility companies, major pharmas and worldwide hotel chains. I’ve gotta say,…
It feels like months and months since I wrote a meaningful post on here. I’d love to say it’s just that I’m too busy, but it’s really that I’ve not prioritised this over all the other things that are going on. I’ve got into speaking at events, and I’m loving that, so quite a lot of my time goes on researching and writing talks. The rest of the time usually reserved for writing has gone into coding…
I gave this talk at Berkshire Digital's Pecha Kucha night. I talked about automating development processes to improve the speed at which we can iterate. The full transcript is below Hey everyone, my name is Steve Workman, I’m a web developer living in Reading and I work for a company called PA Consulting in London. I’m also an organiser of the London Web Standards group, and have been for a few…
"Our work here is done" - the immortal final words of the web standards project. Please, read the post, for me it's a tearjerker, and I'll tell you why. Before I left uni, when I still didn't know what I wanted to do, I found the WaSP group online and thought, "that's amazing - people from all walks of life and competing companies no less, all getting together to make possibly the world's most…
It's been an amazing year, getting married, the olympics, doing my first public speaking gig, so many highlights. Here's just a few in pictures 2013 is already shaping up to be a landmark year, I'm hugely excited about it already and can't wait to share the first bit of news in the next few weeks (no, my wife isn't pregnant - see this: http://instagram.com/p/T5k0Nqv0TL/ )
Massively exciting news: I am going to be speaking at the Future of Web Design London conference on their Rising Stars track! I'm going to be talking about "Putting your site on a diet" - an educational/technical talk on reducing the size of web pages whilst keeping all of the great graphics and interaction that is possible with the latest browsers. I'm really pleased to be doing this talk, if…
TL;DR; I've made a polyfill for CSS3 Object-fit. Download it from Github here: https://github.com/steveworkman/jquery-object-fit The need for object-fit A month ago, I was looking into creating a responsive grid full of images for a client. The width of the columns would vary depending upon device, and the dimensions and aspect ratio of the provided images could not be guaranteed. The issue for me…
Yesterday I attended The Guardian Mobile Business Summit in London. As a few hundred mobile marketing and business people from a wide variety of large and small companies sat and listened to talks on the future of mobile, mobile wallets and the mobile ecosystem. Some of the talks were very interesting in the huge number of stats that they poured out: conversion rates, sales figures, profit…
This month was a very special meetup for London Web Standards - it's 5th birthday celebrations! Yes, it's hard to believe that 5 years ago in October three guys met up in a North London pub to talk about the web. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Imogen Levy baked us a massive 7-layer London Web Standards Cake (British Bake-off contender next year 2013 for sure). Imogen, thank you so much…
September's London Web Standards Meetup featured UX designers and developers bringing print to life with their tales of making web apps for the FT ( Matt Andrews ) and an iPad app for The Week ( Harry Brignall ). Sketchnotes are below. Sorry it's not much of a write-up (and a month late) but better late than never.
Last night, Twitter blogged about upcoming changes to its API in version 1.1 . It's not the most communicative of posts, goes on for quite a bit and has incensed quite a lot of developers. The fury is all about this diagram and paragraph: In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site…
My CSS bookshelf is now available on github as an easy download if you want one yourself. Given that the code is now 2 years old it's showing its age somewhat, so I'll give it a spruce up over the next few weeks. Things like: Removing the jQuery dependency (as I know a lot more JS now) Using a CSS pre-processor on the stylesheet Adding CSS gradients for the spines of the books, because there's no…
This month's London Web Standards was on augmented reality, a hot topic a few years ago that is making its way back into people's mindshare with projects like Google Glass. We had Dr. Paul Coulton talking about the current state of AR on mobile, Imogen Levy talking about how Westminster Abbey is using 3D and AR to improve the visitor experience, and Trevor Ward talked about how we can use AR now…
HTML5 video players are incredibly useful, enabling developers to display video on non-flash devices (I'm looking at you, Apple). It's really simple to get started with HTML5 video, but when you want to do something more complicated, there's not much documentation. Thankfully, it's really quite simple, and this article will show you how to use the HTML5 video JavaScript API to interact with the…
Last night was London Web Standards' Semantic Web event with Mischa Tuffield and Jarred McGinnis talking about RDF standards, SPARQL, how it all works and how it works in the real work in the mainstream press. Here's my sketchnotes from both presentations Sketchnotes of Mischa Tuffield at LWSSemantic Sketchnotes of Jarred McGinnis at LWSSemantic
This weekend, London Web Standards manage to get evangelists from all of the major browsers in a panel to talk about their companies' products. After a week of Opera bashing for being the first vendor to alias webkit CSS prefixes it was a sight for sore eyes. Thing is, from what I've observed, this is how things usually are between the vendors. Sure, there were a few cutting comments about each…
Just a quick post to say that State of the Browser 2012 was awesome. I had loads of fun, met a lot of great new people and heard loads of really interesting talks. If you couldn't make it, sad times, but we streamed the whole thing live on the website. Vimeo videos will be on the website soon, direct yourself to browser.londonwebstandards.org for the goodies. Before that, I was taking photos, so…
Yesterday, I went to Bath to learn about the latest in mobile development from some of the best people in the industry. We had talks from network operators, people who interact with developer advocates, how to make money from apps, digital media distribution, the future of the mobile web and talks about good web apps and responsive web design. I took sketchnotes throughout the day and inked them…
If you've ever wanted to scrape a web page and extract some information using Node.js, there's a really useful module called JSDom that parses a document and gives you a DOM that you can then manipulate with YUI or jQuery. This all works really well... on Linux and OS X. On Windows, Node.js can't run pre-built native Node.js libraries, so it has to be build by the NPM build service. This is all…
February 2012's London Web Standards event at Forward London was an introduction to Node.js , the server-side javscript framework designed for high concurrency and real-time events. There were two sessions at the event, George Ornbo ( @shapeshed ) giving an introduction to Node, and a "Node & Tell" session, where four sets of developers came and told the gathered crowd how they'd been using Node…
If you follow any front-end web developers on Twitter today, you'll probably have come across articles on vendor prefixes and the latest CSSWG fight over Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera wanting to implement -webkit- vendor prefixes. Before I delve into why this is happening, I want to make something very clear** - this is wrong and must not happen.** So why is it happening? The February 2012…
Last night, I was lucky enough to meet Joe Stump , former Lead Architect at Digg and founder of SimpleGeo, who sat down with 7 developers near Old Street and showed us his latest creation: Sprintly . Here's my notes from the talk. Sprintly was born out of frustration in how products are made. Joe is a business major, not CompSci like many Silicon Valley successes. The guiding principle behind…
In my work, I'm parsing web services all of the time. Most of the time, they're XML, which does not make the best use of bandwidth/CPU time (compared to JSON), however, if it's all that you're given then you can certainly get by. I've been looking into ways to speed up the XML document traversal in with jQuery after the current best practice method was removed. The basic way to find certain nodes…
I'm investigating a problem with loading locally installed fonts in Windows 7. It's a weird one this, and it only seems to affect Firefox and IE9/10, or, those browsers that use DirectWrite. The problem This image shows the beautiful Univers font in four different browsers. Each of them are rendering the following CSS: #univers55, #univers55bold, #univers45, #univers45bold { font-size:3em;}…
Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to meet Josh Clark at FOWD. I'd been reading his articles about flagship apps and content first, and I was very keen to have a chat with him about a discussion I'd had with a client. I had been discussing which platform they should be targeting, and depending upon who I was talking to at the client (and their opinions on the goals of the project) the decision…
It's been quite a few months since I've been really inspired to do something. The last time I was truly inspired was after watching The Social Network: the film about the origins of Facebook. It's a tale about a man and some friends who was driven to create a service that everyone on campus, and eventually the world, would use. It's inspiring because it's played out by an anti-hero (Zuckerberg)…
Adobe has done the unthinkable, it's actually bought two companies worth giving a crap about. Nitobi , makers of PhoneGap , and TypeKit , pioneers of the CSS3 web-font game, have been acquired by Adobe. Adobe should be thrilled. It's now got two sets of highly skilled developers with great ideas and good products to work with. TypeKit is an obvious acquisition as it'll be part of Adobe's Creative…
After a summer break, London Web Standards was back with an evening of WebGL with Ilmari Heikkenen from Google and a short demo from Carlos Ulloa of HelloEnjoy . Sketchnotes are below Carlos Ulloa of Brighton-based HelloEnjoy showed off two demos that he made using Three.js and WebGL. The first was HelloRacer , an interactive look at the 2010 Ferrari F1 car that you can even drive and do handbrake…
A really quick note: one of my colleagues Ed Hartwell-Goose has written a post for the Google App Engine blog on Project WOW - a site for weather enthusiasts to send their readings to and be collated by the Met Office. It's well worth the read to see what we've been up to and some of the hugely high-performance stuff you can write for App Engine. You see the site in action over at…