On Our Radar This Week: Replicators, RWD and More Resources

Welcome to On Our Radar, a weekly round-up of news, trends and other cool stuff from the world of web development.

As ever, there’s been a whole lot of groovy stuff going on: Nestlé announced that they intend to make a real-life Star Trek food replicator, Larry Page voiced his opinion that the future of the workforce may well be part-time (which is fine by me) and it came to light that the NSA thinks that Linux Journal is an extremist forum. Meanwhile, scientists revealed that men would rather receive an electric shock than think.

In tech news, a startup founded by Dropbox and MIT alums launched, which aims to power the next generation of email applications. Google announced a Gmail API aimed at giving developers a better way to build apps that integrate with Gmail and, not wanting to be left out, Microsoft increased OneDrive storage to 15 GB free for everyone.

WordPress

There’s been a lot happening in the world of WordPress lately. A new plugin aims to bring true version control to the blogging tool and CMS, the beta version of WordPress 4.0 was released, and Longreads (owned by Automattic, which also owns WordPress), leveraging the fact that WordPress famously “powers 22% of the internet”, created a collection focusing on the Best of WordPress, Vol. 1.

Here are some more links to help you brush up on your WordPress skills:

Bonus fact: WordPress sponsors beer conferences. What’s not to love?

Learning

It’s not just your WordPress skills that need keeping up to date. Here’s a mix of tutorials and articles covering everything from functional programming, through deploying Django on Heroku, to Jetbrains’ somewhat unfortunately-named 0xDBE.
Enjoy!

Responsive Web Design

Nowadays, almost every new client wants a mobile version of their website. So what to do? There was a time when the mobile experience was relegated to a subdomain (usually “m” or “mob”), but then along came Responsive Web Design (RWD) and turned it all upside down.

RWD describes an approach that, with the aid of CSS3 media queries, allows the design and content of a site to adapt to the size and orientation of the user’s device (be it a smartphone, tablet or PC). RWD is a great way to make your site look great no matter how it is viewed and is an essential skill for designers to master.

Testing

There’s been a lot of debate around test-driving your code lately, embodied by a series of discussions between Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and DHH (the creator of Rails).

Whichever side of the fence you come down on, the fact that we should all be testing our code is inescapable. Here’s a bunch of links to help you do just that.

Introduction To JavaScript Unit Testing (An oldie, but a goodie)
Simple Testing in Ruby Using Minitest (Video)
A BDD Workflow With Behat and Phpspec
Make Your Ruby Tests Cleaner with Minitest and Shoulda
Fearless Browser Testing [JSConf2014] (Video)
Stop Guessing, Start Simple A/B Testing (Testing of a different nature)
Taking the test trash out with DatabaseCleaner and RSpec

And don’t forget, one major advantages of testing is being able to refactor your code with confidence, as demonstrated in this article (Ruby) and this one (PHP).

Resources

There’s so much good stuff appearing daily, it’s hard to even know where to start:

Largest collection of free Microsoft eBooks ever
Web Development Tools for Linux & How to Install Them
Placekitten (A simple service for getting pictures of kittens to use as placeholders)
RawGit (Serves raw files directly from GitHub with proper Content-Type headers)
cdn.js (An open source CDN for Javascript and CSS)
Take a digital health check (Courtesy of Mr. Paul Boag)
Prelang (Automatic Rails Development)

That’s it for another week. I’ll leave you with the awesome phenomenon that is giflinks (make sure you use them in your next project) and an example of stunning design bringing an otherwise boring subject to life.

Now it’s over to you: do you make all of your sites responsive by default? Is TDD truly dead? How much would you pay for a Star Trek food replicator? Let us know and the conversation can begin.

Also, if you have any problems implementing anything covered here, or just want to discuss it some more, SitePoint’s forums are a great place to visit.