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Jenn Lukas

Stand on One Foot and Other Public Speaking Tips

Posted on 7/11/13

This is my last week at Happy Cog. I’ve coded a lot of websites in my six-plus years here, but I’ve also written and spoken a lot about coding websites. At Happy Cog, you are encouraged to put yourself out there and share what you know, which can be totally awesome, terrifying, and sometimes confusing. When I first started speaking, I, like many others, was in the “terrified” camp. I told this to my then-HC-co-worker, Dan Mall, and he said something along the lines of: “If you get nervous, stand on one foot.” Of course, I thought this was some kind of sure joke, but then he continued, “You’ll have to focus all of your efforts on not falling over that you’ll forget to be nervous.” Some of the best advice I’ve ever received.
Making Front-end Development a Team Sport

Posted on 3/7/13

“All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed,” is one of the many ideas behind documents such as Rick Waldon’s Idiomatic JS and Nicolas Gallagher’s Idiomatic CSS.
If you could learn anything, what would it be?

Posted on 9/20/12

This can be absolutely anything. Go ahead and think about it for a minute. I recently posed this question at my dConstruct talk (slides / audio) a couple of weeks ago and received a variety of answers. Learning a new language was a popular response. So was learning how to cook, garden, ski, and do “The Robot.”
The Importance of Conventions

Posted on 5/3/12

Flashback to the mid 90s. You are rocking your Prodigy dial-up, excited to play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game. You click a link to the game, wait 5 minutes for the page to load, and are confused when you are staring at bright green fluorescent text telling you to “Invest $100k” instead of calculating Leondardo DiCaprio’s Bacon number.
The Gift of Giving

Posted on 12/15/11

One of the interesting things about being in front-end development and the open web is that once you publish your website, anyone can see your work. Whether you use Firebug or Web Inspector or good old View Source, you can view everything I do in a quick click. This has always been one part terrifying to me (I swear those extra spans were the CMS WYSIWYG’s idea) and three parts awesome. As someone who loves web standards and the idea of creating a better web for all, I think it’s radical to share what we do with each other. If you threw all of our code from the interwebs into one big room, it would be one heck of a learning party.
I have a new crush and its name is figcaption

Posted on 8/11/11

When it comes to HTML5 elements, do you ever feel like you’re reaching for a carrot on a stick? The promise of those tasty elements, hanging right in front of you, taunting you, so close, yet just out of reach. What you wouldn’t give for just one bite of a section, one taste of a succulent aside, one thirst-quenching datalist. I bet no one told that donkey it was going to have to wait ’til 2022 to eat that carrot.
Are Doctypes the New Lunch Tables?

Posted on 4/14/11

Viewing source has gotten pretty rad these days! Looking around the web, a good command + u (yes, I use Firefox/Mac) can provide an afternoon of exciting show and tell. One thing I like to look into is at which DTD table everyone is sitting these days. When the HTML5 doctype was introduced, some folks grabbed it and never looked back to the land of system identifiers again; others were cool with rocking a doctype that has been working for them for the last decade or so. This has caused some separation between those who see the choice as the past versus those who see it as the future. The cool table versus the lame table.
Happy-Libs: We’re All In It Together

Posted on 12/16/10

No matter what field we specialize in, each of us faces common day-to-day responsibilities, tasks, and expectations of awesomeness at our jobs. Sometimes we might assume that people in different roles don’t face the same challenges; however, when we break it down to the basics, it might surprise us how much we all have in common. See for yourself!

Jenn Lukas
@jennlukas
Interactive Development Director

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