Tracking ECMAScript 6 Support
ECMAScript 6 is being progressively implemented by browser vendors over time and as such there is no ETA on it being available in all environments.Whilst specs and implementatio...
Blog
You can find my latest AI engineering articles on Substack, leadership on LeadDev, or browse my topic guides and personal blog posts below.
Personal Blog
Checking in front-end dependencies
Package management is an important and evolving area in front-end development. It's also a contentious one with some favoring Bower, others preferring npm and Browserify and a n...
Making Maven Grunt.
IntroductionDevelopers working in agencies often tell us that they want to be able to use modern front-end tooling in their workflow. One set of options this manifests as is usi...
Gone In 60 Frames Per Second: A Pinterest Paint Performance Case Study
In my new article with Paul Lewis on Smashing Magazine, we discuss how to improve the paint performance of your websites and Web apps. This is an area that we Web developers hav...
Jank Busting With Daft Punk
Yesterday, I looked at the new Daft Punk web experience on Pitchfork. It was visually stunning, featuring rich-animations throughout. I noticed however that scrolling on the pag...
Author In ES6, Transpile To ES5 As A Build-step: A Workflow For Grunt
Preface: This article assumes prior knowledge of Grunt, the JavaScript task runner and that you've heard of Traceur, the ES.next to ES5 transpiler by Google. Getting started...
Taming The Unicorn: Easing JavaScript Memory Profiling In Chrome DevTools
“The Unicorn has a special ability to help it's master when in trouble. When tamed, they will not attack humans or tamed creatures, but will attack anything else with ...
Yeoman Update: announcing 1.0 beta 4, Windows support, Refreshed Angular, Backbone, Ember generators and more.
Today we're happy to announce the release of Yeoman 1.0 beta 4. A number of large updates have been made to the project since beta 3, covering scaffolding, performance impro...
DevTools Extensions For Web App Developers
The past year has seen many leaps made to improve developer productivity through better tooling. We're paying increasing attention to our workflow and many of us have spent ...
Take Care When Using Null Transform Hacks For Forcing GPU Acceleration
At my jQueryTO keynote on paint optimization, I mentioned the performance benefits of promoting DOM elements to a composite layer using GPU acceleration in Chrome. Moving compos...
DevTools: Visually Re-engineering CSS For Faster Paint Times
Increasingly, whether it’s on desktop or mobile, users want their web experience to be snappy and delightful. This means that even if the browser is busy rendering the pag...
Tooling For The Modern WebApp Developer - Video From DotJS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C5-LjRfomYThe video from my DotJS talk in Paris is now up. I hope it's useful. In it I walk through how to performance profile your...
Curated Talks To Help You Become A Better Front-End Engineer In 2013
Many of us care deeply about developing our craft, but staying up to date can be a true challenge, especially when the quantity of fresh information we’re regularly ...
Improving Web App Performance With the Chrome DevTools Timeline and Profiles
We all want to create high performance web applications. As our apps get more complex, we may want to support rich animations and that ideal 60 frames a second that k...
A Few New Things Coming To JavaScript
I believe the day-to-day practice of writing JavaScript is going to change dramatically for the better when ECMAScript.next arrives. The coming year is going to be an exciting t...
The Breakpoint - Tooling Tips And Tricks (Playlist)
Woo! The last five episodes of The Breakpoint (our show on tooling) are now up and you can keep track of them by subscribing to this playlist. We're hoping to cover finding ...
Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript
JavaScript engines such as Google’s V8 (Chrome, Node) are specifically designed for the fast execution of large JavaScript applications. As you develop, if you care about ...
The New And Improved Developer Toolbelt - Video From Fronteers
The recording of my talk from Fronteers is now up: http://vimeo.com/52450814. In it I discuss the front-end developer tooling landscape spanning the command-line, your edit...
The Breakpoint: Episode 3 - DevTools Source Maps, Shortcut Secrets And JSRun
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HijZNR6kc9A In this episode, we take Coffeescript to JavaScript to Minified and all the way back with source map...
The Breakpoint: Episode 2 - SASS Source Maps, Feature Inspection And More.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PPXeWjWp-8YI and the (real) Paul Irish return for the second live episode of the Breakpoint - a new show focusing on ...
The Breakpoint with Paul Irish and Addy Osmani: Episode 1
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ktwJ-EDiZoUIn this first episode of the The Breakpoint - a new show dedicated to developer tools and time-saving tech...
HNpod 11: HTML5, Apps, Yeoman and Web Audio
I was fortunate to be on the HackerNews podcast, discussing Yeoman, HTML5, the state of apps and Web Audio. It was a fun show and we talked through a number of issue around nati...
Yeoman, At Your Service.
When kicking off a new application, we always seem to have libraries we need to manually find and add, boilerplate code that needs to be written and a thorough build and testing...
Custom Sublime Text Build Systems For Popular Tools And Languages
Sublime Text is currently the text editor of choice for a number of developers in the open-source community. It’s sophisticated, has powerful text selection and customizat...
Substack
Future-proofing your Software Engineering career
Practical strategies for engineering careers in the future
The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
A field guide and why we need to rethink our expectations
User-centric engineering
Engineering with user empathy is the foundation of great products
There is no right time. Just time and what you do with it.
How to thrive in imperfect conditions
Comparison is the thief of joy
Navigating comparison with mindfulness
Focus on what you can control
Actionable advice for empowerment
10 lessons from 12 years at Google
My lessons learned along the way.
LeadDev
Grow your influence like a leader, not a boss
Extending your influence past your immediate circle isn't as straightforward as you'd like to hope. But there are a few strategies you can employ to help.
How to build an effective technical strategy
Building a tech strategy requires a lot of moving parts. Learn about what routes to take and whether decisions should be top-down.
How to keep up with tech trends and upskill sustainably
With so many developments in the tech world it's difficult to keep up. Here are some strategies to stay on top of your upskilling.
Navigating competing priorities as an engineer
How can you prioritize when everyone's ask is an urgency and you don't have time to fit it all in?
Managing the chaos of context switching
It's time to examine the good, the bad, and the very ugly elements of context switching. Even better, we'll take a look at some strategies for managing it.
Focus on outcomes over outputs
Software engineering teams should focus on outcomes over outputs to deliver the best user and business value.
What makes an effective software engineer?
Being a good software engineer is not necessarily the same as being an effective one. Here, Google's Addy Osmani identifies the ten key traits of effective software engineers.