From AngularJS to React to agentic coding: a decade building Abode and Moved.

In March 2015 I wrote my last post on this site. I announced that a few collaborators and I were going to build the same single page app twice, once in Angular and once in React, and compare the two. I promised to “continue with updates about the app when we start making noteworthy progress.”

This is that update. It is eleven years late, and the comparison has a winner.

It certainly has been a while since I've updated anything on this site, and a lot has changed in that time. I'm not really a website builder / web developer any more. At least not in the way I used to see myself. The freelancing version of me was focused on creating sites on open platform content management systems. I was really into Drupal (still sort of am) and thought it was the way of the future. Well times they have been changin'.

A customer requested a custom content scroller that would showcase a grid of products on a single page. Unlike a typical scroller, they wanted horizontal only scrolling and the addition of "prev" and "next" links to advance the scroller one product column at a time. The challenge came from a user interface constraint that I imposed myself: I wanted to add "snap points" to the scroller.

Starting sometime in January, things around here have really started to heat up.  I have fielded numerous inquiries from head-hunters, experienced a giant step up in project quote requests, and have talked to a handful of new and existing customers about forging a full-time arrangement.  To me, it appears that I have reached a cross-roads with fourfightingfoxes that could easily move forward on one of two different tracks.

While importing some past projects to the new website, I ran across an excellent tool that I haven't used in a while, but that I still think can be quite useful when used properly.  I'm talking about an interactive color picker that is loaded with some javascript to allow the user to manually control certain color areas on the page.

This is the first in a series of introductory tutorials created to provide a guide to learning about the basics of the Drupal administrative interface. This tutorial will provide an overview of the following topics:

• Drupal introduction
• Admin login
• Creation of new content
• Find and edit existing content

Sometimes I come across a bug (usually in internet explorer) that just makes me gasp at how horribly something can go wrong simply because the browser was poorly implemented.  This week that honor once again goes to IE.  Below, you will see a couple screen captures of the exact same browser content as rendered in Chrome (on the left) vs. IE (on the right).

For one of our current projects we are building a website where the design dictates that most of the content is presented using a dropdown menu approach. Normally, a dropdown functions best when all of the content is already loaded on the page, and just relies on javascript to animate the display and hiding of each dropdown element.  For this design, it is pretty obvious that requiring all of the overlay content to load along with the initial page is excessive for both load times, as well as complicated for the CMS organization and structure. AJAX to the rescue!

This week I have been stressing about embedding videos in HTML 5 using a cross-browser compatible solution that conforms to the latest mark-up guidelines.  After looking around at multiple resources, it became apparent that the current browser usage patterns require at least one fallback option in order to include all the different mobile devices, and older browsers still in use by a large segment of the population.

No matter how tech savvy you may be, there is often a language barrier when discussing internet technology. Sometimes it stems from a brand new technology that no one has really heard of. Other times it can be a simple issue of "How do you pronounce that word anyways?". Lets take "Wysiwyg" for example. I find myself using that word pretty often when trying to explain to a potential customer how they will be able to change/add content on their own without coding knowledge.

2012 is nearly​ here. To bring in the new year, we are launching a completely renovated website, built in Drupal 7, to showcase the latest design trends and development techniques that we have been promoting. Not to mention, we were growing jealous of all of the great sites we have been busy producing and shipping out the door, er, portal... inter-tube? So anyways... out with the old, in with the new.