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.