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Interface Development team weeknote (week 1030)

Posted by Paul Carvill June 1st, 2010

Post-curry: (l-r) Ross, Paul, Mark, Tanay, Himani, Andrew, George, Neil

This week Martin’s been refactoring the lbi.co.uk site’s JavaScript for better performance and cleaner code. Maintaining high standards is one of the reasons you should always eat your own dog food, and while your own website is always an ongoing project this one’s looking pretty good now. Martin’s been a busy man — he’s also been consulting on the side for various projects around the business, including Houses of Parliament, Barratt Homes and Lloyds TSB, and planning for a huge Virgin project kickoff next week.

This week Andrew also claims to have (presumably inadvertently) insulted 1 client, although no further details were forthcoming…

Ray stayed up well past midnight most nights while working on Processing examples of data visualization for a forthcoming Technology department Show & Tell session he and I are working on.

Myself and Andy’s iPad-related project is going well — our QUnit test suite is up and running and at the last count 75% of out tests were running green! Also, I’ve been introdcued to the pleasures of the PDoc JavaScript documentation generator. It’s well worth a look as an alternative to JSDoc, because it doesn’t parse the code itself, only your comments. This means you have a much greater level of control over what is documented, and how. And in the case of JavaScript’s extremely flexible nature this is a great benefit to have. I’m not yet convinced that I’ll move over to it entirely, but it looks promising.

Finally, we said goodbye to Tanay who is leaving the London office and heading back home to start a new journey with LBi India. Mark summed up Tanay’s stint here pretty well, so I’ll just quote him:

“It’s Tanay Day at @LBiLondon. After several hundred years and a number of different beard configurations, he and his family are Mumbai-bound”

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Interface Development team weeknote (week 1029)

Posted by Paul Carvill May 24th, 2010

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!

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