News : May 2008
Webvisions 2008 Contest!
Want to score a free pass to WebVisions 2008? Enter our shiny new contest! One lucky winner will walk away with not only a conference pass, but entry to the the Type Class workshop with typography guru Roger Black. For more information and details on how to enter, click over to our contest page. Good luck!
New Issue: Page Performance and Lazy Loading
Jakob Heuser is the newest contributor to Digital Web, covering JavaScript libraries, webpage performance and loading concerns in Improve Your Page Performance With Lazy Loading. Jakob covers how to improve page weight and download times with a lazy loader utility, based on the JavaScript library of your own classic scripting skills.
Opera Dragonfly
Opera have just announced the first release of their upcoming developer tools suite. Dragonfly looks to be similar in form and functionality to the popular Firebug debugger on Firefox, with the added bonus of mobile integration, allowing you to remotely debug mobile devices. There’s a detailed overview and screenshots at Dev.Opera.
It’s only an alpha release at the moment, but it looks like a promising start — whether it will be enough to unseat Firefox as most developers’ browser of choice remains to be seen.
Front-end dev skills at Yahoo! Juku school
Today Yahoo! announced via the YUI blog that they’re seeking students for their Yahoo! Juku program. Yahoo! Juku is an interesting training opportunity in front-end development skills—“HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP”, plus more—as well as working experience within a guided program inside Yahoo. Yahoo is pretty direct about their goals for the Juku program, which are to grow talent they particularly need, train their own staff to teach (cool!) and also draw attention to the void around web skills in academic CS programs. Here’s Yahoo’s call-to-action:
If you’re a budding Front-End genius with a strong background in programming fundamentals and a passion to learn, [Yahoo! would] like to hear from you.
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The vision of the Juku program is to provide top-quality training in frontend technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP) with the ultimate goal of producing great frontend engineers. Participants are put through 3-4 months of intensive training taught by some of the best frontend engineers at Yahoo!, focusing not just on concepts, but also on best practices in terms of maintainability, accessibility, and performance.
I like that Yahoo is addressing the lack of CS dept. attention toward web development skills, while so many social websites bring web programming into day-to-day lingo. And in the ashes of the Yahoo-Microsoft merger coverage (disclosure: I work for partly MSFT), it is nice to see focus continue on efforts like education, even with so many open questions about where Yahoo heads next.
