Blog Insights
What Did You Do This Summer?
As I head back to school at Northwestern this fall, I am sure I will hear, “What did you do this summer?” 100 times. My response will be "Well, let me tell you about my experience as an apprentice at Source Allies." From day one, myself and four other apprentices were...TypeScript: a Superset of JavaScript
class Car { numberOfWheels: number; color: string; } function describeCar(car : Car){ return "Number of Wheels: " + car.numberOfWheels + " Color: " + car.color; } var car = {numberOfWheels: 4, color: "Red"}; document.body.innerHTML = describeCar(car); That’s...Neatly Clean Up Your CSS Layout
Recently I started to use a more minimally-responsive CSS framework called Neat, since I was unhappy with the total offerings of so many others. This article will explain how to start using the basics of Neat in order to better understand how the framework works before using it in projects. Before...Simple SVG Graphing
Graphing is a great way to visualize a bunch of data. In this article we will talk about a simple way to make graphs for modern web browsers. We will be using dimple.js that is powered by D3. Here I will explain everything that you need to know in order...Unlearning jQuery
Now that you have already learned jQuery, let's unlearn it and get back to the basics. In this article, we will quickly go over the most common things that jQuery is currently used for and convert them to pure javascript. jQuery is a great tool and contains polyfills that are beneficial....Dry Up Your CSS
As we start to build websites with mobile first in mind, our stylesheets can get messy really quick. In this article, we'll talk about making your stylesheets more functional and easier to read at the same time. We will take a quick peek into SASS, and the benefits that it...Put the Grunt Work Behind You
Gulp is quickly becoming the the leading task runner over grunt. If you are currently using Grunt or even worse, an ant task, then I highly recommend this topic for you. In this write up, we will quickly discuss Grunt, Gulp, and Gulp syntax. Let's take a look at how Grunt...A Basic Canvas
Over the weekend I decided to play around with the new html5 element canvas. The canvas allows you to paint images in the browser that previously was done with flash. Canvas is fairly straight forward and only requires a basic knowledge of html and javascript. I decided a good start would be to try and make a...Mobile Grails
I threw out iWebKit immediately because it only targets iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. While iUI "now supports most smartphones & tablets" it's current version is 0.40alpha1. Furthermore the Grails plugin doesn't appear to have been updated in the past 2 years. This left me with Spring Mobile Grails and jQuery...Javascript functions for creating a read-only view
I'm sure you've all been there before. After months of creating page after page of crud screens, you're now asked to create a read-only view of everything. I usually see this implemented with setting the readOnly attribute on every field to a variable that indicates whether or not the screen...