Language has power, and its usage is neither benign nor harmless. Ableist language, even when unintentional, can promote stigmatization and marginalization. Vocabulary, with a simple adjustment or replacment, can be modified to be more inclusive and accommodating while we also cultivate innovative ways to collaborate and communicate.

A tale that relays my experiences getting Capybara system tests to run successfully in a dev-container on an Apple silicon based computer.

Using Test Driven Development to Solve Fibonacci Sequence.

An exploration of how to utilize regular expressions to change the design of your website when using TailwindCSS.

Using js hooks and LiveComponents.

Using Phoenix Channels and Presence.

Bootstrapping a new Phoenix project.

Building Single Page Apps from the server.

We foster the small conversations, friendships, and teamwork that forges teams together.

Refactoring for fun and profit.

Defining done in software is a moving target.

Creating order out of the chaos of Tailwind utility classes.

What's Now and What's Next in the Elixir community

Testing Rails applications under Docker with Capybara and Selenium

Using React Native's built-in tools to create responsive screens.

Using React Native's built-in tools to create responsive screens

Using Docker to soothe the pain of developing Rails apps that have a complex infrastructure

Using Docker to soothe the pain of developing Rails apps that have a complex infrastructure

An introduction to creating reactive Rails applications with StimulusReflex

We decode a mystery involving comma operators, property accessors, and a single missing character.

A developer's experience using Windows for Node and Ruby on Rails development.

Redux is a popular state management tool that is commonly used in React development. It works well with the structure of Ionic, making it especially useful for Ionic React developers.

Going over the hows and whys of web sockets in Rails 6.

Create Capacitor Plugins for ios and android to detect text in still images using CoreML for ios and MLKit for android.

Create Capacitor Plugins for ios and android to detect text in still images using CoreML for ios and MLKit for android.

Create Capacitor Plugins for ios and android to detect text in still images using CoreML for ios and MLKit for android.

Create Capacitor Plugins for ios and android to detect text in still images using CoreML for ios and MLKit for android.

Create Capacitor Plugins for iOS and android to detect text in still images using CoreML for iOS and MLKit for android.

Create Capacitor Plugins for ios and android to detect text in still images using CoreML for ios and MLKit for android.

The fourth, and final entry of the JSON API tutorial series. In this phase we'll be creating an Ember app that will connect to the JSON API server.

Ionic is a very important piece of the full development puzzle. They open new doors by bridging many gaps, including community.

Exploring Action Text; a new framework bundled with Rails 6

Learning what Active Storage is and how to use it.

A look back at how 31 days of building a Flutter app went.

Navigate to an image page with a hero animation.

A title worthy of pirates.

Initial pass at creating users in Firestore.

Add rules for who can create users in Firestore and test with emulator.

Set up Mocha to test Firebase Firestore rules.

Adding an iOS and Android adaptive icon.

Setup Firebase Firestore and see how to deploy database rules.

It's bad form to have untested features.

Add a styled form for a user to register with.

Lay the groundwork for registering new users.

Show a notification when a user signs in.

Mocking external services for tests.

Using Firebase Auth for Sign in with Google.

Configure Firebase Auth for Sign in With Google.

Configure Firebase Auth for Sign in With Google.

Show a Floating Action Button for authentication.

Render Unsplash images from the network.

Generate random mock data with faker.

Transform Stream data to models.

Using StreamBuilder to to render a ListView.

Add some mock data and a post model class.

Extract the post to its own widget.

Create a widget to display a list of cards.

Create a widget to display when content is not available.

Cleanup the base theme with white space everywhere.

Let's upgrade to Flutter 1.0 and look at some of the big announcements from Flutter Live 2018.

Configuring Travis CI to run lint analysis on every push to GitHub.

Configuring Travis CI to run tests on every push to GitHub.

Install the SDK and generate a base app.

Building a Flutter app in a month with Firebase.

A video by Ryan and Jon on how to set up Geolocation in Ionic 3.

Improve your page load time by pre-caching resources during service worker installation.

Replace core-js with a modern reflect-metadata implementation to reduce your production build.

Will and Jacob share some of their favorite tools for programming with weather.

The RemoteData pattern can simplify your code and make it more robust.

An investigation into using Capacitor to build an existing web app for mobile platforms

Explore different web component libraries by comparing vanilla JavaScript, Nutmeg, Polymer, and Stencil versions of the same component.

The next version of Ionic will ship as a collection of web components, usable in any front end framework. Will it work with Elm?

Improve your site's performance with service worker caching

Optimize rendering to speed up your site's time to interactive.

Split your Rails JavaScript with Webpack to make your site load faster.

Bendyworkers were at RailsConf 2018 in Pittsburgh having fun and talking about PRPL and offline.

Join us at RailsConf 2018 for a workshop on bringing modern JavaScript performance to Rails

The second entry of the JSON API tutorial series. In this phase we will be implementing our JSON API server with Express.

The second entry of the JSON API tutorial series. In this phase we'll be designing our API and using Swagger

The first entry of the JSON API tutorial series. In this phase we'll be setting up our api and client projects.

Join us at RailsConf 2018 for a workshop on bringing modern JavaScript performance to Rails

With mobile browser support nearly everywhere, it's the right time to invest in a Progressive Web App.

Nutmeg is a tool that helps you quickly create, test, and publish a web component.

The IntersectionObserver API is a relatively new web API that allows you to observe when a DOM element enters or leaves a viewport.

Get Google Closure compiling without any errors

Learn how to easily debug your compiled code with Source Maps

My journey through beacons, local notifications, and background mode

Learn how to iterate quickly with the Webpack Dev Server

How to use Ionic Lazy Loading to its full potential

Learn how to save time and cut down on bugs with TypeScript and Webpack

Building a dynamic form made simple in Ionic 2.

Setting up and using Elm in Rails 5.1 is simple with the Webpacker gem

Make an re-useable, encapsulated web component using Custom Elements v1 and Shadow DOM v1

Check out how to add video messaging to your Rails app and get it up and running on Heroku.

Progressive Web Apps bring powerful native features like push notifications, offline, and homescreen install to the web.

Get more accurate performance profiling results with HdrHistogram

Part 2 of a tutorial covering how to use Elixir to build a Slack bot

There are a number of different options, none complete

We show how to hit the ground running with webpack and start your development with a basic configuration.

Explore why the Maybe Monad is useful, but perhaps not in Ruby.

Learn how to take the latest commits to the Ruby on Rails master branch for a spin

Prevent Google Closure from clobbering third party JavaScript libraries by using ClojureScript externs inference programmatically.

The first of two posts about using Elixir to build a Slack bot

We show how to optimize your ci and webpack builds with a few plugins and adjusting your configuration.

Progressive Web Apps bring powerful native features like push notifications, offline, and homescreen install to the web

Leverage immutability and functional programming for the front end with Elm!

We show how to use pmap and doall to parallelize HTTP requests in Clojure

We improved ClojureScript’s hash-map performance by 2x-100x

A regex solution to escaping leading numeric CSS selectors in JavaScript.

Rails enum is useful but dangerous; here's how to wield it properly.

Leverage immutability and functional programming for the front end with Elm!

Learn how to wrap a Linux-based C API with Swift, featuring glob

We explore setting up a Rails backend with an Angular frontend... with donuts!

Ease your Haskell development environment with Stack, a new tool from FPComplete

Bridging the development-documentation gap between text formats

Connect a simple Ruby API with Ember using generators from Ember-CLI

We’re open sourcing the code that this series of blog posts is based upon.

In Part 2 we proceeded to closely mirror our domain logic using Haskell types and typeclasses

In part two, we move on into the Haskell realm where we can build up true domain logic.

We're releasing Caravan, a sample implementation of a version-enforced API server.

Building a secure database-backed API server in Haskell.

After 48 hours, we shipped an app for the Rails Rumble!

Using Ember.js with SOAP

Recently Rich Hickey announced transducers for Clojure, the next big idea in Clojure after reducers.

In Clojure, we often work with collections in various types of sequences (lazy or not), and core.async channels. The workhorse functions in Clojure...

When a small red circuit board called the Tessel appeared on a crowd-funding site over a year ago, its promise to bring simplicity to hardware hacking caught my eye. It’s now on the market and, with a project percolating in my mind, I ordered one to...

We’ve been playing around with Ember since before it was extracted from SproutCore, and it wasn’t until recently that we got this unusual request from one of our clients: “Can you embed an Ember app in an external page like you would Google Analytics...

BendyConf 2014: “A Paean To Plain Text” by Chris Wilson from Bendyworks on Vimeo.

In this day and age of rich documents with multimedia features, what can we say about plain text? Is there any place for it any longer?

In this talk poem Chris suggests...

Estimation is a crucial but challenging element to managing any software project. Without estimates, we can’t say what stories (or features, in our lingo) are in scope or not in scope for a given development phase. At the same time, the process of...

Clojure has been growing in popularity since its first major release in 2008. If you or your company is interested in understanding the value of Clojure at a high level, read on.

Clojure might be the answer if:

Your existing application is written...

This post is one in a series of blog posts that answer some of the most common questions we get from prospective and current clients. All of the posts in this series are under the Questions tag if you want to view more like this.

As a consultancy...

Josh’s BendyConf talk introduced us to Firefox OS, an open source, web focused mobile operating system developed by Mozilla. Although it has been available for more than a year, this June marked the release of version 2.0, making now a good time to...

Four inches per minute. Two hundred forty miles per seven years. One and a half millimeters per second. Even without something to compare to, most would consider this an inordinately slow pace. And yet this is the average velocity of an engineering...

Since Swift was announced less than one week ago, we as a community can’t reasonably expect syntax rules to be pulled into popular highlighting libraries like Pygments yet (though it’s certainly already in the works). You’ll notice in our most recent...

Swift, being all the rage these last four days, has definitely livened up our programming chat room quite a bit. With cautious optimism, we (Betsy and Brad) delved into the Xcode beta, curious about the state of testing with Swift. For the purposes...

I recently attended BayHac 2014, the Bay Area Haskell Hackathon, and I wanted to cover some of my impressions from the conference. I’m breaking it down by the days and the things that I attended. There’s a ton more on the event page linked above for...

After hearing that Twitter would be sending its engineers to the UW to talk about Apache Storm, a group of Bendyworkers bundled up against the cold and made the short trek to the UW.

View Controllers in iOS: we need to talk. You are—without a shadow of a doubt—the worst offender of the Single Responsibility Principle, and that needs to stop.

One of the defining characteristics of Haskell— that you often see listed in what sets it apart from other languages— is that it is the only common language that’s lazy.

If I may impose upon you for a minute, relational algebra is one of those things that, like linear algebra, is a shining intellectual gem.

What can SQL do for you? Chris shares his thoughts on the changelog on how to take full advantage of relational databases.

In response to a great discussion in the bwoken issues forum, I’m happy to announce the first beta of bwoken version 2! The major change, which justified the major version bump, is that bwoken is no longer invoked with rake but instead with bwoken

Imagine yourself at a concert on the streets of Madison, a block away from the Wisconsin State Capitol (known for, among other things, being the largest granite dome in the world), listening to Willy Porter, and waiting for the headliner—Eric Hutchinson

While visiting Twilio for a day on my two-week programming pilgrimage I learned that I’ve been pretty insecure. Joël Franusic (@jf) explained that I needed a security makeover. You probably do too! So let’s get started. Follow the suggestions as you...

There’s a cool article by Steve Losh called List out of Lambda that reminded me, in a really good way, of a section in SICP. If you want to read the boiled-down scheme version that’s in SICP, here it is: SICP section 2.1.3. What follows is my paraphrasing...

It has been a while since I last wrote one of these posts and I didn’t want to leave people sitting by their computer desks forever, waiting with bated breath for the next one to pop up in your Google Reader feed (…whispers from the Internet…), okay...

Part 1: What is analytics really?

Web analytics should hurt a little. Not just the pain of seeing your low traffic revealed in hard numbers, but the realization that you don’t really know your visitors.

We programmers tend to be preoccupied by our...

You might as well learn it now, because you’ll be using it in 6 months. Styleguide rails is a cool gem that builds a living, breathing styleguide for your site. You can add it to your project really easily (let’s just do it right now):

gem install

You read that right. Or maybe, if you read it as “stop using Ruby and start using Haskell”, you read it wrong. I’m going to show you why I find Haskell to be utterly fascinating and eminently practical.

Foremost, I want to collect some bits and pieces...

More Unix than Unix

Do you like Unix? Do you really like Unix? Well, what if I told you there’s a little-known operating system out there that’s more Unix than even Unix is. Cool, right?

Well it is true! Plan 9 occupies an interesting niche in the...

Security in web applications is not something developers discuss often enough – some think of it as a taboo subject, or something the NOC guys have to deal with. Some treat security as a post deployment afterthought. Sometimes little thought is given...

Last weekend, three Bendyworkers and a Swink-person (Swink-ee?) participated in the Rails Rumble, a competition to build a web application in just 48 hours. Rather than hacking on the backend like I usually do, I ended up almost exclusively forging...

tl;dr: If you are looking for a lightweight document preparation system in the style of LaTeX, try out troff which is probably already on your system.

Intro

Lurking deep in UNIX, even on your shiny new Mac, is the eldritch horror of troff. It waits...

A brief tour of some other editors

Quick, think of your favorite $EDITOR. If you’re anything like me or the people I work with, you’ve got a horse in this race. And again, if you’re anything like myself or my comrades, you’ll probably say Emacs or...

Matthew McCullough (@matthewmccull) leads Git workshops across the world. He recently visited Madison, Wisconsin to discuss and demonstrate advanced topics such as rerere merging, the reflog, interactive rebase, cherry-pick, show-branch, branch filtering...

Like any piece of art, a stylesheet should be indivisible and bold, but natural. It should arrive to the browser in one elegant file, a succinct connection between page semantics and presentation. Preprocessing distances a stylesheet from the Sturm...

“Want to see the future?” Dale Sande (@anotheruiguy) leaned toward me with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye. His laptop was crowded with code and design layouts. He proceeded to show me that I have been doing CSS all wrong.

My first mistake is using...

Version 1.1 of Bwoken has just been released! This feature release includes the ability to run UIAutomation tests on a device rather than the simulator, in addition to a number of internal improvements to Bwoken.

Developers we come across have always...

Shedding some light the respons_with feature of Rails

Bwoken is a UIAutomation test runner for both iPhone and iPad, which lets you write your tests in CoffeeScript, then run them in bulk from the command line. Watch the video, then head on over to its homepage!

This is about that oft-neglected corner of programming, the humble boolean. Perhaps, by thinking about what’s going on in many boolean expressions, we can iron out his quickly-forking complexity. And, oh, what luck! Here’s a slab of boolean logic that...

Tiggering Pusher events from automation code.

Note: This article was cross-posted from Brad’s personal blog: Naming Things is Hard

Over the last month at Bendyworks, I’ve been pairing with Jaymes on our latest initiative: adding iOS development to our repertoire. As a Ruby developer learning...

A native front-end to Travis CI

A Twitter app written to help experience live events in a new way.

Using HTML5 shiv libraries

Do two things to help with gems on Heroku.

Some tips for managing gems on Heroku.