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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 6: Reducing the weight of Image Heavy pages

On the sixth day of Xmas, Ian Feather takes a look at performance with a focus on image rich designs. Using a real-life case-study of the Lonely Planet website redesign, Ian takes a look at some of the techniques you can for some worthwhile performance gains.

by Ian Feather

Day 5: Are you browsing comfortably?

Are you browsing comfortably? In the web development industry, wherever and whenever I’m talking to someone, and the phrase “Responsive Web Design” enters the conversation, I immediately think small: phones, tablets, and fitting the web into very small, very high resolution areas. Now that the Internet is encroaching on every aspect of our lives, this […]

by Steve Workman

Day 4: Let’s make a web component!

On the fourth day of Xmas returning author Ruth John shows us some new tricks with some future web technologies: web components! In this hands on tutorial, Ruth guides us through how to build a web component introducing new concepts like templates, the Shadow DOM, and custom elements.

by Ruth John

Day 3: Interaction Evolved

On the third day of Xmas, Ashley Nolan discusses the evolution of how we interact with the web. Taking a look back at the simplicity of the past all the way through to the more engaging methods seen today, Ashley explores this evolution showing some great real-world examples and ponders the potential future uses for these emerging technologies.

by Ashley Nolan

Day 2: Every-day functional programming

On the second day of Xmas, Tim Ruffles introduces us to the world of Functional Programming with some insights in to the main concepts. With examples from JavaScript, Tim explores some of the key ideas behind the programming paradigm allowing us to relate them back to things we do every day.

by Tim Ruffles

Day 1: Computing Education

On the first day of Xmas, Helen Armfield talks about the state of computing education for children today. With the new curriculum changes, coding is going to be taught from a much earlier age. But is this just a case of box-ticking, are we seeing these changes for the correct reasons, or is it sacrificing real education instead? Here Helen discusses the importance of not just the requirement of coding being taught but how we go about teaching the future generations of coders.

by Helen Armfield

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