12th November 2014 - A Big Day!

Whilst not viewed by millions via a live TV feed, the events of the 12th November 2014 are an awesome reminder of how far we have come in space exploration.

Thousands of things could have gone wrong to prevent this amazing achievement; and several things did go wrong.   Let's take a moment to reflect on the magnitude of this event.

Test Driven UI Development with Node, Mocha and RequireJs (part 3)

Last time, we completed the scaffolding of our little web app.

This time, we'll make it actually do something - and perform a little refactoring along the way.  I'll also talk a bit about more advanced features of mocha.

FODMAPs and Misinformation

As a sufferer of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), I've recently come across a thing called the "FODMAPs" diet - which is meant to relieve some of the symptoms of IBS.  Something that none of the many treatments for IBS that I've been prescribed have managed.

Everything that I've read recommends consulting a nutritionist before starting on a FODMAPs diet - but that's a sensible step for anyone considering an exclusion diet.

Test Driven UI Development with Node, Mocha and RequireJs (part 2)

Last time, we set out a framework for doing test driven development with our front end code.

Now we're going to build on that scaffolding to create a simple web app, adding modules as necessary as we go.

Setting up TDD on a Mac with iTerm2 and vim

In order to get anywhere with TDD, it is vital to set up your development environment so that re-running tests is either automatic, or requires only a single keypress.

Here's how I have things set up...

Test Driven UI Development with Node, Mocha and RequireJs

Test driven development, or TDD, is often held up as an ideal to aim for in unit testing.  Its simple premise of write a test, pass the test, refactor the code - or red, green, refactor - leads to good coding habits.

But testing your front end javascript code is hard... just getting it into a position where you can test it at all is tricky, and following examples on the web will tie you in knots.  Then there's yet another problem... dependency injection.  With so many hurdles to jump, it is little wonder that many projects have a handful of fragile integration tests that leave you wondering whether the trouble was worth it.

I'm going to attempt to lay out a method by which front-end code can be readily unit tested, without needing a headless browser.

Android ICS and target-densityDPI

I was debugging an interesting issue on our mobile site recently, and the problem came down to densityDpi

This attribute in the viewport meta tag for android devices is documented here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html

So what's the problem?

We have a little pull-down console that is included in pages whose content is mainly under the control of a third party supplier (I won't go into the complexity there).  This console would shrink down during the page load.

On Gingerbread and Jellybean, the  shrinkage would only affect the offending page, but on Icecream Sandwich, when we then navigated to another page, we would find the whole page had shrunk - and it would continue to display "zoomed out" pages until we reset the browser settings.