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A Yelp for Developer Platforms?
For my talk on mobile app strategies, I really wanted to give the audience an idea of the options out there, and help them understand the pros and cons of each option. I'd only used a handful of...
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The Red Queen: Sex, Gender, & Evolution
blockquote { padding: 0 0 0 15px; margin: 0 0 18px; border-left: 5px solid #EEE; } As you can tell from my reading list, I love reading books about evolution, science, and sex. I just finished reading...
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Using FancyBox with Zepto
On the web version of the EatDifferent site, I use the jQuery Fancybox plugin to lightbox meal photos when you click on them. On the mobile version, I left them as clickable images. I've realized...
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Porting jQuery Plugins to Zepto: Tips & Tricks
As I've written about it here in the past I've spent a fair amount of time porting jQuery plugins to work with Zepto, a lightweight alternative with a smaller API surface. You can read those posts here...
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Working around Android Webkit
I use PhoneGap to output the Android app for EatDifferent, and that means that my app runs inside an embedded Android browser. As I've discovered and re-discover everytime I work on a new version of...
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API Usability Testing
I often joke that API hackathons are basically API usability testing days, the best opportunity for API teams to see first-hand how developers use their APIs and what problems they ran into - so when I...
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Converting Addresses to Timezones in Python
In a perfect world, we'd all live in the same timezone and it would be the same time everywhere. Unfortunately, we have a sun, and the earth goes around the sun, and the earth is round, and someone...
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Horsing Around Arizona
A few weeks ago, Anton and I took a road trip out west. In our original wild scheme, we were going to road trip all the way from San Francisco to New York… but then we found out that a) most of America...
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Using the Instagram API from a Python Flask App
Instagram came out with their Android app last week, and finally I had a solution to the age-old problem: all my home-cooked, healthy meals look like crap when photographed with my Android Nexus S...
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Theming Tumblr with Twitter Bootstrap
I started a blog recently for EatDifferent and I decided to use Tumblr as the blogging platform, as it has more of a community than other platforms. I wanted the blog to share some of the look &...
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Learning to Code Online
In my closing keynote at Mix-It 2012, I talked about why I think everyone should learn programming as a basic skill and then about the various non-traditional ways that programming can be learned, both...
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Learning to Code in SF
San Francisco is filled with developers — but it's also filled with people that want to learn how to be developers. Thankfully, there are many ways for would-be developers to learn from the current...
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Triggering Numeric Keyboards with HTML5
In the PhoneGap-powered mobile apps for EatDifferent, there's a part where you can enter measurements like weight and body fat — numbers like "12" or "150.5". I realized that I had to switch between...
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The Best Online Editors for Teaching HTML/CSS/JS
Over the past few months, I've been teaching in-person classes on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as part of GirlDevelopIt San Francisco. Along the way, I've experimented with various online consoles and...
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Using Grunt.js with CSS
For most of my apps, I've been using either a Makefile, shell scripts, Python scripts, or some combination of those as my build tool — taking care of tasks like concatenating files, minifying files,...
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Client-Side Storage Article Series
After giving a talk a few months ago on Client-side Storage, I was asked my DrDobbs.com to write it up in article form. Well, thankfully, I'd actually written most of the slides up already in my...
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Alternatives for After-Parties at Conferences
This post is based on a discussion and brainstorming from FooCamp 2012. I attend a lot of conferences, either as a speaker or attendee, and back when I was at Google, I even organized a few...
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A Year of Hermit Hacking
A bit over a year ago, I announced that I was leaving Google and going out in the world to see what it held for me. I spent the time since then as a "hermit hacker", working on my own projects from my...
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My Next Step: Coursera and The World of Online Education
Over a year ago, I left Google to go out in the world and try and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I spent much of the last year "hermit hacking", mostly on EatDifferent, and as I explained...
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Porting to the Paid Google Translate API v2
Last year, one of the little apps that I put together was Translation Telephone, which lets you enter a phrase and translates it across 20 languages until finally translating back to the original...
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