In this article, James Miller and Mate Marschalko cover the basics of how to get started building for your own IoT devices using JavaScript. When building IoT devices, the task is typically divided between two roles: A hardware engineer creates the physical device, and a developer the ecosystem. However, this is not always necessary. In the case of JavaScript, its isomorphic nature allows for one language to be used across multiple platforms — including hardware. While the prospect of building your own hardware can be daunting, hopefully, after working through these two examples, you’ll be already thinking about the possibilities and planning your next project. Many components are compatible with the Johnny-Five library, meaning that the only limit is your imagination.
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Ideally, we’d love to have one tool that would either generate “smart enough” crops and plug in the responsive images markup in the build automatically, or provide one interface to visually adjust the focal point of images and output “ready-to-go” markup. We aren’t quite there yet, but we might be soon. In the meantime, the tools listed in this article could be good enough options to consider when tackling a quite daunting task of producing art-directed variants of images — either manually or by building custom CMS plugins.
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There have been some amazing quantum leaps in JavaScript tooling which have made it possible for you to dive head first into writing fully ES6 modules, without compromising on the essentials like testing, linting and (most importantly) the ability for others to easily consume what we write. In this article, Jim Cowart is going to focus on how to create a JavaScript package written in ES6 that’s usable in a site or app regardless of whether you’re using CommonJS, asynchronous module definition (AMD) or plain browser global modules.
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Service workers do a lot of different things; there are myriad ways to harness their powers. In this article, Lyza Danger Gardner explains what a service worker is and how to put together your own by registering, installing, and activating it without any hassle. She decided to build a simple service worker for her website that roughly mirrors the features (provide a customized offline fallback experience, make the website function offline, and increase online performance by reducing network requests for certain assets) that the obsolete Application Cache API used to provide.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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In this article, Nadav Soferman introduces a new free open source web tool that will allow you to generate breakpoints for your images interactively: the Responsive Breakpoints Generator. Nadav hopes this tool will help you address some of the challenges related to responsive images. This complexity is the driving force for new solutions that keep arising, such as the HTML5 picture element and srcset image attribute, the Client-Hints specification, and plenty of other client-side and server-side solutions.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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JavaScript developers faced a great revolution with Node.js, by allowing them to write code that runs directly on their machines. They started to easily write tools for the command line that automate a lot of things in their development cycles. npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving them quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which they install on their machines to access from wherever they are in their system. Make the most out of it Installing packages from npm globally.
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Developers have no reason not to explore Client Hints. The key benefits are more maintainable responsive image tags, fewer image bytes transferred and, ultimately, happier end users. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will focus on how to address responsive images issues, with a little help from the web server and Client Hints, the new way for the browser to request images with specific properties.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
Read more…