Codemods: Effective, Automated Refactoring January 29, 2019 Maintaining software is challenging. Stagnant software quickly becomes obsolete and this couldn’t be truer than in the JavaScript ecosystem. JavaScript firmly holds the reigns as the language of the web…
Compiling Go to WebAssembly January 15, 2019 For many years there has been the only way to write client-side logic for the web; JavaScript. WebAssembly provides another way, as a low-level language similar to assembly, with a…
Cats vs Dogs: Answering the Important Questions December 19, 2018 SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference…
Node+JS Interactive 2018: From Accessibility to JS Interoperability October 23, 2018 The 2018 edition of the Node+JS Interactive conference featured nearly 1,000 JavaScript and Node.js enthusiasts at the first combined event organized by the Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation. The event…
The Return of SharedArrayBuffers and Atomics September 19, 2018 A common complaint of modern web apps is the concept of jank; web pages being unresponsive to user input and frame rates being low. Left unmitigated, this problem leads to…
Programmatically create images with the CSS Paint API August 27, 2018 The CSS Paint API is a modern web platform feature to programmatically create images in JavaScript which are rendered to the page when referenced by CSS. You create images using…
Cross-tab Synchronization with the Web Locks API August 14, 2018 The Web Locks API is a new addition to the Web Platform which allows you to execute JavaScript in a lock, a resource which can potentially get shared with other…
Exploring the Resize Observer Proposal June 4, 2018 Resize Observer allows developers to receive notifications when the size of an element’s content rectangle changes. This helps manage a variety of application layout scenarios including responsive application layout, flexible…
A Quick Look at Nest May 9, 2018 Nest is a scalable framework for building server-side applications. It is authored in TypeScript and relies on the Express framework. It leans heavily on modern language features such as async/await…
Escape the Office: Designing Interfaces for Other Developers May 4, 2018 At the recent TSConf, SitePen engineer Sarah Higley delivered a talk titled Escape the Office: Designing Interfaces for Other Developers. The moment you step into any large project or open…
CSUN ATC 2018: Attack of the Acronyms April 17, 2018 Picture lots and lots of dogs wearing vests Now, are you thinking of a Lewis Carroll-esque canine tea party, or a collection of service dogs? If the latter, you may…
Don’t forget your keys April 16, 2018 At the recent NEJSConf, SitePen engineer Sarah Higley delivered a talk titled Don’t forget your keys. People tend to assume everyone navigates the world in the same way they do:…
Introduction to WebAssembly April 13, 2018 WebAssembly is an emerging standard for a low-level assembly-like language in a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance, and is available as a compilation target for a variety…
Blockchain Basics September 21, 2017 “Blockchain” is the newest term to enter the tech industry’s buzzword repertoire. Whether a company is processing sub-second banking transactions or transporting artisanal goat cheeses across state lines, it seems…
Rethinking Inheritance September 19, 2017 Over the past year we’ve been heads-down working hard on Dojo 2 and its component architecture. The ability to change default component behavior is essential to a widget library, and…
Polymer Summit 2017 September 13, 2017 Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Polymer Summit in Copenhagen with a SitePen colleague. Having attended the PWA Summit last year in Amsterdam we were…
Observing Intersection Observers September 5, 2017 As developing for the web has matured and JavaScript engines have become faster, one area remains a significant bottleneck – rendering. It’s because of this that so many of the…
Five of our favorite emerging web standards August 31, 2017 As we create and improve open source software, and build many applications for our customers, we’re constantly looking for things that will improve the software we create. Part of this…
Functional reactive programming and Observables in JavaScript, TypeScript, and Dojo 2 February 27, 2017 Functional programming and reactive programming principles are not new to JavaScript, but their adoption has recently become widespread across most modern frameworks and toolkits. The ease of using these approaches…
Simplifying Intern tests with Command helpers April 19, 2016 Intern, via the Leadfoot WebDriver library, provides a lot of low-level control over the browsers it uses to run tests. Tests can navigate to new pages, resize the browser window,…