Steve Grunwell

Open-source contributor, speaker, and electronics tinkerer

Tag: JavaScript

A typewriter with a sheet of paper reading "Equality"

Strict Equality for Better Code

A major focus of my day job right now is cleaning up the PHP in a decades-old monolith, which includes tests written for two different test runners by hundreds of engineers over the years.

I could write a book on the horrors I’ve seen (and currently have at least half a dozen blog posts in draft state), but I’m not interested in raking anyone over the coals for past engineering decisions—honestly, it’s to be expected with any project this size and age. Instead, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of the most prevalent oversights made by engineers of all levels: strict equality.

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Recap: CodeMash 2015

Last week I attended CodeMash 2015, my third time attending the conference. Held at the lush Kalahari Resort and Convention Center in Sandusky, Ohio, CodeMash brings together some of the brightest minds in Ruby, .NET, and JavaScript for two days (plus a pair of optional “pre-compiler” workshop days before the main conference) of code, networking, and (eventual exhaustion).

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Bypassing JavaScript Anti-Clipboard Measures

As I write this, my new Epiphone Casino is sitting in my lap and I’m looking up George Harrison guitar tabs. Unfortunately, when you’re best known as one of the Fab Four, lawyers love to block access to your work that doesn’t bring in royalty checks for your estate. When looking for one song in particular, What is Life, my go-to tab site, Ultimate-Guitar.com, came up short.

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Quick Tip: JavaScript Resize Timer

I wanted to share a little trick that I use a lot when building responsive sites that can be a huge help for your front-end performance, which I call the “resize timer”:

Imagine the following scenario: you have a series of horizontally-aligned boxes on your page, which should be equal height. Of course, this is easy to pull off with Flexbox, but browser support isn’t exactly where we want it just yet. Use it where you can, of course, but you might still need a JavaScript-based fallback for older browsers.

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Notes from Build Responsively Workshop

The other week I attended the Build Responsively workshop, presented by Sparkbox out of Dayton, Ohio. The workshop was two full days of responsive web design evangelism and techniques. Being a geek in a room full of other geeks, I thought it would be cool to write my notes in Markdown, then put them in a gist so I could easily share them while updating them between sessions.

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Be excellent to each other.