The day has come. There is no need any more for floats or tables or other hacks to create page layouts on the web. CSS can do it. Finally, it has its own tools for laying out pages properly.
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Category Archives: Tips & Tricks
Squeezing all the juice from HTTP/2
Since we are well into the 21st century and HTTP/1.1 is no longer enough for most of us, let’s discuss some ways we can speed up our websites to run them faster, more securely, etc.
Many people have heard of HTTP/2 protocol, but not everyone knows how to use all its features.
Lets take a look at some 🙂
Personalizing cached HTML pages with Varnish
Everyone is using Varnish to speed up their sites nowadays. Varnish greatly decreases page load time on websites with mostly anonymous traffic. But many anonymous sites still need to personalize content a bit based on user geo location, time-of-day, the languages the browser claims to support, etc.
Header bidding and page load speed
Although improving page load time is the second biggest reason to use header bidding vs. daisy chaining (after the increased revenue), it has its own problems when it comes to site speed. Due to the single-threaded nature of browser JavaScript runtime and the limited number browser / OS resources, header bidding is likely to add seconds to your average page load time.
Floating (and coding) on Cloud9
I was always a bit skeptical of the whole Cloud IDE thing, that was until recently when I gave Cloud9 a shot. I must admit, I was surprised when I read the Engineering Orientation wiki page for one of our clients, Vroom.com, as it suggested I create a Cloud9 IDE account as part of my project setup. What??
I figured I’d give it a try…
Drupal 8: Views scrollTop behavior
It’s a weird piece of Drupal 8 out-of-the-box behavior: each time after you AJAX-load a views block with exposed filter, you are scrolled to the top of the block! It’s especially tiresome for mobile device users… Is there a way that we can fix it??
Removing this behavior entirely is a massive improvement. Here is a recipe to circumvent the issue for Drupal 7 – but it won’t work for Drupal 8! But search no more. Here for you is the exact solution:
TechTalk Wrap Up: Stacy
This past Wednesday evening, at our HQ in New York, Boyle Software’s VP of R&D Lev Gimelfarb gave an excellent TechTalk on his latest development effort: Stacy. It was a fantastic way to reinvigorate our TechTalk series after a long hiatus! We had a good turn out of Boyle Software employees as well as several colleagues, clients, and friends. Pizza was consumed, beverages were imbibed, and we all learned some new things…
Kicking the tires: Mulesoft
In the past couple of years I’ve seen lots of companies and products moving from monolithic applications to microservices world. As large, heavy web services are being replaced, I’ve started looking into products for REST services integration.
Mulesoft seems to be a good place to go for REST services integration and implementation. RAML is racing Swagger to become #1 solution for API design. Their Anypoint platform is making the integration of third party API’s simple and efficient. Using the ability to connect to SAP or ServiceNow platforms makes this solution perfect for wide variety for consumers. Mapping and transforming data capabilities are great bonuses as well.
Minecraft: programming for modders!
Whenever I walk into a hands-off meeting during E3, I never know what to expect. Especially when running late and having completely missed the overall introduction to the meeting. When I walked into an E3 demo with the Mojang developers, I was excited to see an opened text editor. This meant that we might be diving into some code and that honestly made me really happy!
Record collections and RESTful API
Here is a typical situation encountered when developing server-side applications that expose a RESTful API: We have a resource that represents a collection of records of the same type and the API allows querying this resource. The result of this query is a list of matching records, normally represented as an array of JSON objects.