2019 In Review

GraphQL Europe 2018 — A summary

A roundup of the second GraphQL Europe conference in Berlin. Written for the Sainsbury’s Engineering Blog.

Our GraphQL Experience

A summary of our experiences getting GraphQL into production. Written for the Sainsbury’s Engineering Blog.

THRASHED BY A LADY CYCLIST (1899)

ladycyclist

“An extraordinary scene was witnessed the other morning in Peel-lane. a hug and little-used thoroughfare connecting Little Hulton with Tyldsley. The principal participants were a young lady cyclist and a youth of nineteen or twenty. The lady was proceeding at a good pace, when in a quiet part of the road a young man, who had apparently been imbibing, stepped into the roadway, and addressing some remarks to the cyclist, made as if he intended to pull her off the machine. She immediately alighted, caught hold of the astonished youth, and gave him a sound thrashing, using, her fists in scientific fashion, to the delight of several colliers who came upon the scene. Tho young man made off, and the cyclist, who is believed to be a Bolton lady noted for her athletic powers, rude on towards Tyldesley. ”

Spot the Ball: Round 8 - NYTimes.com

The spot the ball competition from the NYT has been fantastic. Needs to be a weekly thing for the premiership.

Dug.js — A JSONP to HTML Script — Rog.ie

Cool utility to streamline API -> HTML

A More Modern Scale for Web Typography | Design in the browser with web fonts and real content — Typecast

In RWD, the proportions and rhythm of your body, headers & measure deserve as much attention as margins, floats & media queries. Jason Pamental of H+W Design explains why, plus throws in a scale you can use and a live demo.

Debuggex: Online visual regex tester. JavaScript, Python, and PCRE.

Best regex tester I’ve used - includes ace visualisation, and unit tests.

Magento on Heroku - Part 1

A quick introduction to Magento development on Heroku

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A Tour of the Bus | Hank Bought A Bus

Love this bus conversion - brilliant use of space, and amazing how light and modern he’s managed to make a School Bus look.

Marvin the Cat

Marvin the cat

Users Continue to Double-Click Online - Articles - Baymard Institute

As with most design targeted at a wider audience, the difficulty here is not in coming up with a solution or even implementing it technically – rather, it is to realize the problem exists in the first place.

This Was Britian

For the last two decades we have become an economy that is dependent almost entirely on finance and retail, the former supplying the cheap credit spent on stack-em-up, sell-em-cheap clothing and food.

Just as we have got used to £2 T-shirts and having ripe bananas in the depths of the British winter, we have got used to cheap food, and we do not really care where it has come from.

Slightly depressed after reading this, but it’s all bang on point.

Macaw - The code-savvy web design tool

Quite excited for this - if it can come good on the promise of semantic html/css, it’ll end up being dreamweaver but good.

3D Book Showcase

Absolutely love the use of transitions here.

The Substance of Style

Anderson’s scavenger-hunt aesthetic stands him in good company, alongside Quentin Tarantino, David Gordon Green, James Gray, and the other Anderson, P.T. But what makes Wes Anderson distinctive is the sheer range of art that has fed his imagination

Fantastic series covering the influences and inspirations of Wes Anderson. Part 5 video shows just how dense his films are.

The Basement

Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream basement. You find a old room. Mostly empty, dusty, and dead quiet.

Fitness by design

The promise of this movement is nothing less than minimal-effort self-improvement; of the language of A–B testing, always in beta, perpetual optimisation and analytics, but applied to the body and mind, to yourself.

Interesting article on the growing raft of body-data products, triggered by a diabetes diagnosis.

From one perspective I had a major reality check from a medical professional, delivered in an uncompromising manner. On the other hand, a suite of services and devices I assembled helped me become aware of my behaviour and then change it. Effectively, I’d healed myself through data.

http://alignedleft.com/tutorials/d3/about/

A great set of d3 tutorials from Scott Murray

Books for dads

We're not thick - we just need some good advice.

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The condescending UI

My problem with many modern UIs is that they never get past the telling phase. They’re always dressing up their various functions with glows and bevels and curves, and in the process they somehow become overbearing to my senses. “Did you know you can click this? Don’t forget there’s a save button over here! Let me walk you to your control panel.”

Android: A visual history

Google’s Android operating system has undergone a pretty incredible metamorphosis in the three short years since it debuted on the T-Mobile G1. Think about it: three years, eight major releases. Eight.

Google Webfonts that Don’t Suck

Good curated list of fonts on Google Webfonts. Agree with most of the selections, although I’m partial to Gentium Book Basic as well

Early sketches from the web’s finest

Most designers are accustomed to starting their work on paper. If you’re a designer, you’ve probably got a notebook or two sitting around with random brilliant sketches. Often the initial sketches themselves are something to be proud of — and it’s a shame that no one ever sees them.

100,000 Stars

Another fantastic chrome experiment - amazing use of WebGL for the stars.

Polygonal Map Generation for Games

Using voronoi/delauney diagrams to create game maps - genius.