On the twelfth day of Xmas, Adam Onishi takes another look into some WordPress functionality, this time: how to enhance your themes with WordPress hooks. Hooks are one of the core factors that makes WordPress such a great platform, allowing developers to manipulate the functionality of the WordPress core without modifying the code itself. In this article Adam shows you how to take that power and transfer it to your themes with custom actions and filters.

On the eleventh day of Xmas, Rémy Bach takes you through how you can be the proud owner of your very own robot butler with Hubot. Fed up of searching Youtube manually or Googling for translations? Then this article is exactly what you need to create your very own robot to serve your every need and with some interesting add-ons too!

On the tenth day of Xmas, Andi Smith takes a detailed look at improving your workflow with Grunt. Whether you’ve never heard of Grunt or even if you use it daily, in this article Andi will guide you through everything from getting started through to some handy tips on how to get the best out of Grunt in your projects.

On the ninth day of Xmas, Harriet Pulford takes an interesting look at icon fonts. Icon fonts have become more and more common over the last year or so enabling us to enhance our user interfaces and hopefully create a better user experience. However in this article Harriet explores beyond the everyday uses, showing us what else can be created with some cool icon font experiments on the web today.

On the eighth day of Xmas, the only author to have graced all three years of the 12 Devs of Xmas Jack Franklin is back talking JavaScript once more. This time, Jack takes a look at architecting JavaScript in your Front End site projects, looking not only at how to effectively plan the structure of new projects but also talking about looking back and refactoring old projects as well.

On the seventh day of Xmas, Simon Cox takes a detailed look at the art of Caulking a website. There’s always a lot of things going on around the launch of a site so some simple things could get easily missed. In our first article of the new year Simon takes a look at how you can go about making your website launches as tight as possible and preventing any unwanted leaks.

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.

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

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.