Thinking

I've spent a great deal of time this year finding ways to becoming more involved in solving the problems faced by the education system in England when it comes to the web.

After launching my first project at Clearleft, I revisited the site to see how I could improve its performance. This week I’m going to share some quick wins that I have learnt and used to shed a significant number of bytes and HTTP requests on silverbackapp.com.

When presented with my first development project, my instinct was to jump straight into writing code. Turns out I was getting a few steps ahead of myself and Jeremy had to rein me in and take me back to basics.

The days are short, cold, and grey. The nights long, moody, and haunted by the echoes of howling winds. And so we huddle around the warming monitors of our workstations, and share user stories around roaring post-it notes. Winter is here, that most paradoxically productive of digital seasons.

A collaboration between Clearleft and the Wellcome Trust.

It must officially be winter now, because this week not only have we been finalising our selections for the staff Christmas dinner (ooh!), but a few folk have been struck down with Lady Flu (Sophie) ’n’ Man Flu (Ben W, Graham). Yep, it’s Lemsip a-go-go here.

There was an arrival this week that nearly everyone was excited about.

It's November, it's dark and wet, it must be time to get all javascripted up to the eyeballs at FFConf.

This week there’s been lots of conference action here at Clearleft Towers.

I flew out to Belfast to attend the spiritual successor to Build Conference.

It’s been a bit quiet at Clearleft HQ as various folk have been doing exciting things off-site…

It's been a quieter week than usual in the Clearleft Tower.

This week we've been thinking ahead to 2015

When we started dConstruct back in 2005, we were only the second digital design and technology conference in the UK (the other being @media) and one of a handful around the globe. Jump ahead 10 years and there were over a dozen conferences of note in September alone.

Conferences, Brighton Digital Festival@68 Middle St and virtual records.

This week people got older, our meetings got stuck on repeat, and 5 seconds never felt so painful.