jQuery Demystified
August 31st, 2011 § 0
Guiding slides for the hour-long presentation on ‘What is jQuery’ that I’ve been giving to backend teams.
JSConf 2011
May 4th, 2011 § 0
It’s a fun thing to be at the forefront of a language/technology revolution. I’m always a little amazed at how the JavaScript I began coding ten years ago has turned in to one of the cornerstones of my career. MBAs and years on consensus building are one thing, but it’s this language that truly brings my design work to life, from its prototyping stages to its full production deployment. And while I’ve forged deeper and deeper under its hood, JavaScript has implicated itself further and further in modern development practices. JSConf 2011 brought most of the thought leaders responsible for this implication together for two days in Portland, OR, inducted others in to the circle, and hummed throughout with young, fresh, energy and ideas devoted to the standards language making today’s web hop. Notes on the summit:
Get (Vertical) Rhythm
March 28th, 2011 § 0
The grid-based design behind much of today’s web was revealed to me a few years back as I was serving as in-house Technical Lead for a major corporate redesign. My team worked with designers from an external agency, and as their comps started coming across the wire it was quickly clear that visual components were being aligned to a four-column grid. Everyone liked the order and organization afforded by the grid. When it came time to turn comps into code we went with the 960.gs css framework and to this day, design and development of new solutions takes place within the context of the grid.
Venn and the Art of Overlap Maximization
February 9th, 2011 § 0
A couple of years back I half-yawned my way through a UXWeek breakout session on digital strategy led by Henning Fischer from Adaptive Path. Root cause analysis featured. The group also went through a couple of mock spending exercises. Then I remember a Venn Diagram that had me saying, “I have to remember this,” before I skipped out early for some San Fran Chinese.
McNamara, 12-31-2010
January 7th, 2011 § 1
Rear-wheel drive from Denver to Vail in surprise 12-30 storm.
5:45am 12-31 departure for 9:00am 0-degree Aspen trailhead.
REM, Dylan, Jimmy Vaughn, Son Volt, Tokyo Police.
21 skiers, 4.5 hours, 2,000 feet…
16 beds, 2 days, 42 ski boots.
East Coast Rockies time zone.
Sparklers and down coats.
Euker, Pigs, Celebrity, Comet, Jenga, Dice, Hearts…
Laphroaig, Red Bull, Vodka, Eggplant, Bacon, Pineapple Express.
Skins, skis, snow.
Blisters, tape, and short on joe.
Highlands Bowl…
And a wrinkle in time.
Thanks y’all… and Happy 2011!
A Form
November 25th, 2010 § 0
Almost all applicatons we interact with on the web are form driven. User-supplied data in; system conclusion out. To be sure, a decade plus of experience and innovation has seen UX improve by leaps and bounds. But we’re still building forms, and to that end I always enjoy re-visiting the basic question of how to build them well. Here’s the essence of a recent stab.
CSRF Protection via X-Browser jQuery Ajax Hijack
October 28th, 2010 § 0
Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF) exploit the trust that a site has within a user’s browser. By inducing clicks on links to sites where users are suspected to be authenticated, perpetrators can execute transactions under the umbrella of a user’s current session. Requiring newly generated parameter values with each new POST or GET is one way for programmers to protect against CSRF. But while implementing this requirement in page-driven applications is fairly straight-forward, ajaxified apps make things more complicated. The following approach lets us abstract the complications out of our day-to-day so we can code both currently and securely.
In Response to Ryan Carson
September 13th, 2010 § 2
A yank in the UK who runs a four-days-per-week web agency, has upwards of 26k Twitter followers, and hangs (at least virtually) with other big names like Veen, Heilman, and Snook, it seems Ryan Carson gets his work and is passionate about bringing it to others. He also recently caused a stir with a tweet and accompanying blog post in which he posited that "UX Professional is a bullshit job title" and that only two people – a web designer and a web developer – were needed to create a web site or app. I think UX Pros have their place. The piece I honed in on, however, was the single developer contention. Web site? Sure. But are we reasonably expecting developers to build modern and performant web apps end to end right when new devices and web standards are adding further (albeit exciting) complexity to the task? I don’t know…