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12 Devs of Xmas

Welcome to the 12 Devs of Xmas, 12 insightful articles introducing you to new and exciting things in the world of web development.

Day 12: Fun with MaKey MaKeys for kids of all ages

On the Twelfth Day of Xmas, Linda Sandvik rounds off the 12 days with a look at the fantastically fun MaKey MaKeys. MaKey MaKey’s are a great little tool for hacking together physically interactive projects in no time at all and are fun for any age. In our final article of the festive period Linda shows you some quick projects to get started hacking with the MaKey MaKeys.

by Linda Sandvik

Day 11: The WordPress Loop

On the Eleventh Day of Xmas, Adam Onishi takes a deeper look at the WordPress Loop. The Loop is used in WordPress to produce the content for all posts and pages displayed using the CMS. There are hundreds of articles, talks, and questions about the Loop but in this post Adam takes a deeper look at what’s really going on within the Loop.

by Adam Onishi

Day 10: Setting up a local development server

On the Tenth Day of Xmas, Mike Street looks at development practices and how to utilise a virtual dev environment. As with the previous article on Git Deployment it shows that we’re now looking to improve our workflows, make them more robust and plan for many testing possibilities and collaborative working situations. In this article Mike draws on his experience to show how a virtual development environment can help.

by Mike Street

Day 9: Deploy your projects with Git

On the Ninth Day of Xmas, Rob Miller talks about the power of deploying your projects with Git. Version control has become extremely popular in the recent year and this could largely be attributed to the rise of Git and Github. So in this article Rob will take you through 3 ways you can start to wield the full power of Git to make project deployment a breeze.

by Rob Miller

Day 8: Getting Boxfresh with Flexbox

On the Eight Day of Xmas, Anthony Killeen looks at the future of page layout on the web, Flexbox. Ever since we started using tables for layouts we’ve been hacking our markup for layout purposes, and even the introduction of floats for layout are still a hack. 2013 is starting to look like a great year for the web.

by Anthony Killeen

Day 7: Grid Frameworks

On the Seventh Day of Xmas, Laura Kalbag takes a look at grid frameworks and how the popularity of these frameworks, boilerplates, base templates and the like may be taking away from good development. Good developers should know their code like the back of their hand, so take a look at why, in 2013, it might be worth leaving the grid frameworks as a memory of 2012.

by Laura Kalbag

Day 6: Getting to grips with OOCSS

On the Sixth Day of Xmas, Toby Howarth takes a look at Object Oriented CSS. Recently it’s becoming more and more important to right clean reusable code and with the introduction of OOCSS it’s become easier to bring the DRY methodology to your stylesheets. In this article Toby introduces the basics of how to introduce OOCSS to your projects.

by Toby Howarth

Day 5: JavaScript Command Line Tooling

On the Fifth Day of Xmas, Jack Franklin takes a look at five of his favourite Javascript tools, which are all used through the command line. With developers beginning to realise that knowing the command line is more and more an essential part of their workflow, command line based tools are here to stay.

by Jack Franklin

Day 4: Mixing and Matching PHP Components with Composer

On the Fourth Day of Xmas, Phil Sturgeon brings our first server side article on PHP Frameworks and the use of composer to pick & mix tools where needed. PHP frameworks are plentiful nowadays so here Phil shows you how to get the best out of the potential offerings and easily manage the frameworks you’re using.

by Phil Sturgeon

Day 3: Realtime collaborative drawing with Node.js

On the Third Day of Xmas, Richard Powell takes us through building a web app with a heady combinations of tools, combining Node.js, WebSockets, Canvas, and lots of Javascript! This fairly simple drawing game shows the power of modern day web development and builds on what Rob talked about on Day 1.

by Richard Powell

Day 2: Let’s make a FirefoxOS app

On the Second Day of Xmas, Ruth John takes a look at one of the latest offerings from Mozilla, Firefox OS. Known as ‘Boot to Gecko’ in development the OS is based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine and utilises web technologies to create all the frontend for the OS. In our second article Ruth takes a look at how to create an app for the latest mobile platform, and of course, there’s kittens!

by Ruth John

Day 1: The Future of Games on the Web

On the First Day of Xmas, Rob Hawkes takes a look at the future of games on the web. As a games platform the web has started to come alive recently but comparisons to more established norms can underestimate it’s potential, Rob takes us through some of the possibilities the web can offer to create unique experiences for gamers.

by Rob Hawkes