In Case You Missed It: 2013

Series: 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013

Rather than a bunch of individual “In Case You Missed It” tweets, I thought I’d just do one big yearly semi-comprehensive recap of the web community things that I contributed to this year. Enjoy!

Tool or Die Video

If you only watch one web development talk I’ve done this year, make it this one. It’s a soup to nuts talk about a variety of topics and will show you how to build a future-proof, performance driven website from start to finish.

Related Blog Post: Tool or Die, a Web Developer’s Workflow

Busyness Project

Related Blog Post: You Should Follow Fewer People on Twitter

fixed-sticky Project

A position: sticky polyfill and Filament Group project.

Modernizr :target Feature Test Blog Post

A blog post about creating a feature test for the :target pseudo-class resulted in a feature test added to Modernizr.

A Tweet Highlight

If you use JavaScript to solve page layout problems your users are going to have a bad time.

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) June 21, 2013

Performance and Responsive Web Design Video

This presentation was somewhat of a response to a few of the “RWD is slow” posts floating around. Related:

If you mistakenly believe that “RWD sites are too large for mobile” try replacing that thought with “sites are too large.”

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) October 28, 2013

Fumbling with Social Media Blog Post

A bit of self-research looking at my own use of Social Media and struggle with the balancing act of self promotion.

Impostor Syndrome Video

Don’t be afraid to share what you know.

A Tweet Highlight

In June 2013, Opera Mini/Mobile/Android had 251M unique users. No big deal. That’s only New York City times 30.

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) July 29, 2013

A Tweet Highlight

Free bad idea of the day: “It’s like the Million Dollar Homepage but it’s responsive.”

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) July 23, 2013

A Tweet Highlight

Browser Vendors should be embarrassed at how slow they’ve been to implement something for responsive images.

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) May 22, 2013

Reluctant to put this one on here because I felt like it was a little too snarky (even for me), but disappointly enough it’s been 7 months since that tweet and we still don’t have consensus.

NebraskaJS

NebraskaJS added over 150 new members to the group and had its most successful meetup yet—86 JavaScripters learning about AngularJS! In 2013, we had 7 meetings averaging 65 registrations per meeting (not including our awesome Christmas party).

Open Source

Excluding Filament Group projects.

• Filed a ticket that got the minimium viewport size changed in Chrome:

  Looks like they changed Chrome’s minimum viewport size from 400px to 320px. Great improvement! https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=275686

  — Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 20, 2013

• A crusade against using placeholder polyfills resulted in a contribution to html5please.
• A crusade against vendor prefixes on border-radius resulted in contributions to csslint and jquery-mobile.
• Added the NebraskaJS logo to logo.js.

Mini-Projects

• Published a “Read in X Minutes” plugin for Jekyll.
• AnchorsAway, a bookmarklet to find and display anchor links to content on pages.
• Worked with John Hobbs on Domain Swap, a Chrome Extension to easily switch between domains and keep the URL path.
• Worked with Matt Steele to publish an updated retina-friendly banner for the I Live in Omaha project.