I have just finished my time at Aqueduct after two and a half years leading the front-end work there.
I leave very satisfied, after feeling like we’ve come a long way in that time and the path ahead for those guys is looking pretty exciting.
This small agency I joined has grown (and grown up) quite significantly over my time there. This has been credit to a number of people. For the dev team ask any of the developers that have gone through the agency over the last few years and they will all tell of how inspirational Guillaume is as a person and how he has built a dev team which is now fueling itself to do great work. He’s a good one for quotes and this was a gem recently:
I have just finished a project for Adam Ball who is an artist based in London. This has been a real challenge and has made me push boundaries in to new territory.
Responsive Design, Responsive Images
The main area has been with serving appropriate image sizes according to the device. I have previously talked about my responsive images jQuery plugin which is a good stop gap for getting this to work across the current browser landscape. I have liked working with responsive images in this way because it is a much more organic solution than the ones I have seen elsewhere. It’ll be great when we’ve got something natively to handle this sort of thing.
I’m often a bit of a purist, but as I age, I’m realising more and more the history of the web, much like most other histories is a pretty messy pit of layers laid on top of layers. After reading this revolutionary email from the birth of the img tag, I’m reminded we’re just working on the next layer so it’s probably going to be messy ;).
I have been reading this evening over people’s thoughts about how we tackle responsible responsive images and there seems to be no perfect method. In fact many of the methods currently being seen have major gotchas. It just feels like we are far from getting a stable way of providing responsive images using the img tag.
I did a lunchtime session on some Git basics last week. It is clearly a different mindset which takes a bit of time to adapt to. But it’s worth the effort, the popularity of Github, now sitting at over a million users should be a good indication that there’s a few treasures awaiting.
Here are a couple of books which will hopefully be useful to grow your git knowledge.
Pro Git Book
The Pro Git book can be read online or downloaded for free on various eReader formats. You can also get the paper copy from Amazon.
I have been getting frustrated with the readability of the article body text within Google Reader. It’s just a bit too small and I find it much easier to read serif fonts for large sections of text. I also adjusted the line-height to improve legibility.
So I have created a user stylesheet with http://userstyles.org which changes the body text to something a bit better.
I’ve been taking a look over all that has happened this year as it seems to have disappeared in a bit of a haze and there have been a few great things that I would like to remember 2011 for.
Projects and Work
At the beginning of the year I was running the front-end work on my own at Aqueduct. It was great to get Steve on board on the 17th of Jan (one of the best decisions of the year).
I’ve just finished reading Html5 for web designers by Jeremy Keith and would really recommend it. It’s not too big, I managed to finish it in 4 train journeys and I’m a slug when it comes to reading speed.
If you subscribe to Jeremy’s journal you’ll be familiar with his very laid back and personal writing style, injecting a welcome amount of wit to break up the reading.
I wasn’t quite aware of the relationship between the W3C and the WHATWG. It’s very interesting to see how the HTML5 spec is being put together. And now I actually understand what they are talking about when they refer to “paving the cowpaths”. It essentially is the mindset that if something already exists and it’s use is widespread then make it part of the spec (event if there is a better solution) and outline exactly how we should be using it consistently. The more I think over this the more I like it, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” as Jeremy puts it.
174 people have put their pic up on the Flickr group and changed their social avatar all to show we ♥ web standards and we’re actively adhering to best practices for standardised, accessible, universal web design.
I’m all for making the web available for all. There is still far to go, especially as the landscape is ever changing. I was reading the other day how fast the mobile web is expanding due to the take-up of devices being used in asia and africa. Often people will have a web-enabled mobile device before a computer. I’ve seen some criticism of the mobile first approach, how it isn’t cost effective for companies. I’m in the middle of a couple of projects at the moment where for a small increase in the budget of the project they are making their site so much quicker and more accessible for the mobile web. I have to admit it is a steep learning curve, especially when it comes to interactive features being turned on and off at different sizes but this definitely feels like the way forward, and we’ll gradually get the tools and build the code we need to make the process smoother.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
