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...
A guy walks into a web shop.
I’m thinking of starting a travel blog,” he says.
“I’m sure you’ll need a logo.”
“Oh, a logo? Can you make me one of those?”
And so begins the act of arting, as Bendyworks designer Kelly Rauwerdink calls it, a black...
I’m not an SEO. Until MozCon, I didn’t realize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) could be used as a job title. I knew that keywords and links are important for building site traffic, but meeting over a thousand people at MozCon whose entire careers...
I’m not an SEO. Until MozCon, I didn’t realize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) could be used as a job title. I knew that keywords and links are important for building site traffic, but meeting over a thousand people at MozCon whose entire careers...
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:
I’m not an SEO. Until MozCon, I didn’t realize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) could be used as a job title. I knew that keywords and links are important for building site traffic, but meeting over a thousand people at MozCon whose entire careers...
When we speak to prospective clients or when we explain what we do to people we meet, they often tell us that they don’t understand technology or software. We hear a range of comments from, “I don’t know that much about tech” to “I’m so software...
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...
We believe it’s important that companies provide a forum for employees to share their passions, learn about a diverse array of topics, and enjoy the company of their coworkers. For us at Bendyworks, a big way we do that is through our internal conference...
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...
In his talk The Internet Is Your New Database, Will laid bare the ideas behind the semantic web. While usually shrouded in misunderstanding, the semantic web has lots of cool ideas packed in it.
Will started with the simple notion of a...
For a while now, Bendyworks has offered its employees an annual budget of $1,000 for attending conferences. Travel, lodging, tickets… if it relates to attending a conference, we’ve got our team covered. And if a Bendyworker is speaking at the conference...
Can’t get enough summer tunes? We certainly can’t, and so we’ve partnered with a number of local businesses to bring more music al fresco to our fine city.
ELEVATE, a free concert on the roof of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, places beautiful...
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...
In our neighborhood spring has arrived. For us here in Wisconsin, that means we crawl out of our frost caves and igloos and offer sacrifices of cheese to the Sky-serpent so that he regurgitates Sky-orb for the summer. Also there’s lots of road construction...
Throughout the year, Bendyworks contributes to a number of community-based events - this year we’re also sponsoring individuals to support important work being done in the tech community.
To deepen the team’s knowledge of each of our projects, we started a client talk series during our weekly tech talk lunches.
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.