Technical Leadership
I've been reading a book called the Lean Startup recently. It is filled with great advice and the Lean Startup is basically a business approach that aims to change the way that companies build and launch new products. Whilst reading the book I came across a chapter that
Web Performance
I'm often looking for ways to improve the performance of my websites and provide a better experience for users. Quite often you may find that your site is running efficiently and performing well. You may also have run your application through Google PageSpeed or Yahoo! YSlow and come
Web Performance
This week saw the return of Velocity Conference Europe to our shores. With a great line up of speakers, this conference is a gathering of hundreds of web ops and performance professionals that get together to share their ideas and expertise. Without a doubt, this is one of my favourite
ASP.NET
I am one of the lucky ones. Fortunately my company gives us a MSDN subscription and this goes a long way toward keeping up with the latest Microsoft Software. I have been eagerly awaiting the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 which came out last week. I was a little
Web Performance
An article that I recently wrote for Net Magazine is coming out in the September 2012 issue. The article talks about Content Delivery Networks and the benefits that using one can bring to the speed of your page load times. I am a big fan of the magazine, and it&
ASP.NET
Surprisingly, there are loads of great data snippets hidden inside .Net classes. If you've ever found yourself adding localization to your website, you may have come across the CultureInfo Class in .Net. I know that sometimes I have needed to get a list of country ISO codes and
Web Performance
Social sharing buttons play a big part on the web today. They are used to drive traffic to the site, and if done correctly can be very successful. Unfortunately, the loading of these buttons has its downsides on performance. Having many social sharing buttons on your site can slow it
Web Performance
HTML5 has a handy little attribute called 'async'. This attribute can be used together with Script tags to asynchronously load JavaScript. No more fancy code to get your JavaScript to run asynchronously - you just need to add this to a script tag and it just works. 💡<script
Google Chrome
Google Chrome has come a long way since it's early days. I am a big fan of the Chrome Developer tools and use it in my day to day development. There are also loads of great tools and extensions that are on offer at the Chrome store, and
Testing
The beauty of Selenium is that it allows you to test your UI against all of the common browsers out there at the moment. Writing the code to test for a test scenario is quick and easy and getting up and running with Selenium can be done in a matter
Testing
If you have ever run a large suite of automated tests using Selenium WebDriver, you will know that sometimes it can take ages to complete. This coupled with different versions of browsers can be a bit of a pain. This is where Headless Browsers come in. In the simplest of
HTML5
I was perusing Github the other day and I came across this awesome little JavaScript library. It's called TinyCon and it's a small library for manipulating the favicon in your browser. It adds alert bubbles and changing images pretty similar to the way Gmail does. It&