Programmers familiar with the classic model of inheritance are often confused by JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance when they first encounter it. To help illustrate the differences in the two models, I’ll implement what might appear to be the same thing in both Ruby and JavaScript.

Dad and I got to talk about programming for two weeks before he died.

I was 22, a senior in college completing a BFA in graphic design. Dad was 62, an older dad than most. When he started programming at Tennessee Tech back in the 60s, he wrote FORTRAN on punch cards. He was a wealth of knowledge.

When building a responsive design, it can be helpful to have a reminder of which media query is currently in effect. It’s easy to use CSS generated content to display the current query.

While doing some fun stuff at work, I found myself needing to make a sprite for 50+ icons. Designer Aaron Robbs and I have been wanting to make an icon font for a while now (think Pictos), and I realized that instead of sprites, and icon font might be a better tool for the job at hand.

While in Belfast at BuildConf, I attended a workshop taught by Jeremy Keith.

Forget what you know about web design. From now on, view web design as a union of responsive design and progressive enhancement with a mobile first approach. We’ll call this “responsive enhancement.”

Early November I had the priviledge to attend Build Conf in Belfast, Ireland. Build is an amazing conference, organized by a fine young man. The conference touched on design, development, and typography (three of my favorite things) with a star-studded list of attendees.

Need to make an asynchronous call to Google’s geocoding or reverse geocoding service in a Node.js application? The Geocoder module makes it simple to fetch geocoordinates based on street addresses, or to fetch localities based on LatLng pairs.

At Converge SE this weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop on programming social web applications taught by Principal Software Enginner at Yahoo, Jonathan LeBlanc.

One thing Jonathan covered was the Open Graph Protocol. Open Graph makes it easy for any developer to add metadata to their website pages. The data is primarily used control the title, description, image source, and URL to be displayed when their pages are shared on Facebook, but can be used by anybody.

I had the opportunity to present on front-end Web performance optimization at DevChatt this past weekend. It was a great small conference, with most panels covering topics related to front-end engineering or infrastructure.

I have a post over on the MailChimp blog about the process of designing and building the new site.

It is published with a companion piece from talented designer and coworker Aaron Robbs.