Interface Development team weeknote (week 1029)
A weekly note detailing the joy and the pain of LBi’s Interface Development team. One of the apparent conventions of the weeknote format (which started with the esteemed BERG, according to Russell M Davies in this Wired article) is that the week numbering scheme runs from the date of the business’s incorporation. LBi has a long and interesting history, but I managed to trace it back to the earliest incarnation of the group: Linkhand, date of incorporation 03 September 1990, hence the spectacularly high week number.
Week ending 21/05/10:
This week Will spent a few enjoyable days appreciating the benefits of working to a single platform when he put together an iPhone-specific implementation of one of our clients’ sites. It’s probably a bit hush-hush for now so we’ll do a big reveal of that at some point in the future, but let’s just say it’s “kinda interesting”.
After an enquiry from a colleague as to the existence of a platform-independent version of the popular performance analysis tool dynaTrace Ajax Edition, Ray started to put together a “node.js traffic proxy analysis tool thingy” which has the beginnings of something very useful. It lets you route all your http requests through a node.js webserver, where you can analyse the request headers for all sorts of interesting information. Some further tinkering with this will prove fruitful.
Andy and I continued work on our top secret iPad-targeted webapp. We’ve already spent a few weeks developing the client-side architecture, where we employed an MVC pattern to manage the app, made use of mobile Safari’s offline storage capabilities to take care of state, and layered on our own touch interaction system. Now we’re taking a deep dive into the rendering of the views, which it looks like we’re going to split out into a smaller, independent module and which, thanks to some impressive design work, presents some unique challenges. We’re delivering this module with its own test suite of QUnit unit tests, and we hope it will be integrated into a larger continuous integration workflow.
Our fortnightly Interface Development team meeting had two presentations — Filip talked about the HTML5 geolocation API, and I showed an outline of “How To Design A Good API” which will be pertinent to some of the code libraries we’re developing in-house. We also got some amazingly good biscuits.
We currently have around 20 interface developers in the team so we’ll feature a few here each week and try not to bludgeon you to death with detail. We’re also looking for some more great interface developers, so if you like what you read here then get in touch!
Tags: api, dynatrace, geolocation, interfacedevelopment, ipad, iPhone, javascript, mvc, nodejs, qunit, tdd