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Development

We’ve written 36 blog posts about Development. View all topics »

Hover-crafting

5/15/14

by Sophie Shepherd

As a designer, my involvement in projects’ front-end development varies. Sometimes, I spend most of my time in code; other times, I work solely in Photoshop. But, there is one part of every front-end engagement that I always love to jump into the browser for: to create hover animations.

Hover animations are a site design element just like typography and color, so it’s important that designers take ownership of this step. Not only do hovers add to the look and feel of a site, but they also add an extra layer of usability for users with a mouse. A finished site may “work” without them, but these nuanced touches add polish and really reinforce a site’s personality. I like to think of their addition as “bonus design”—it’s an opportunity to better what’s being built.
Why Developers Need to Learn Design

5/1/14

by Stephen Caver

A couple of years ago at Happy Cog, I transitioned from my position as a designer to a developer full-time. Up to that point, I had been a hybrid designer and developer, splitting my time between the two responsibilities. The truth is that it was a long-overdue transition. My passion lies in the development side of the spectrum, so I am glad to be in a role where I get to express that passion full-time.

I no longer design all day every day, but my experience as a designer taught me that developers should learn and practice design. The trope is often that designers need to learn to write code, but in working as a developer on the web, I’ve learned that the value of a design education pays dividends beyond being able to mock up a page in Photoshop.
The Scoop on Our Benjerry.com Style Guide

3/5/14

by Alison Harshbarger

The web has been all about style guides lately. Everyone from the BBC to Code for America to Yelp released their guides to the public, and style-guide-automating tools like KSS and Hologram are becoming increasingly popular. At Happy Cog, we’ve been making our clients’ style guides more interactive. Our newer style guides go beyond documenting the design systems we’ve established; they take advantage of their living in the browser to dynamically show how a system’s pieces are built, how it responds at different viewport sizes, and how users can interact with those pieces.

For the recently launched Ben & Jerry’s website redesign, we created one of these “interactive style guides.” It covers everything related to building out and maintaining the new website: design components, page layouts, and even content creation. I chatted with a few of the Cogs responsible for the Ben & Jerry’s style guide about how it came together.
You Might Need jQuery

2/27/14

by Cat Farman

jQuery: Maybe you’ve heard of it. If not, may I welcome you to the internet and introduce you to some cool websites? jQuery is a hugely popular JavaScript library that gives you an API to manipulate DOM elements easily, handle events, AJAX your content, and create all the other cool features that make the web go ‘round. The scale of jQuery’s popularity is incredible; it’s used on over 80% of the most trafficked websites, and its CDN serves up over 500 million files a day.
Switch Programming

1/23/14

by Mark Huot

There are countless sayings about fresh perspective: “A little distance will give you a whole new perspective,” “You need to step away for a while,” etc. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where that’s not always possible—or practical. I have a very hard time getting up and walking away from my computer when I’m in the middle of a problem. My mind wants to sit and work right through it, no matter how long it takes.

Luckily, I work at a company that encourages collaborative problem solving. Someone always walks by my desk, hears my mutter, and asks me what’s up. Typically, explaining the issue is enough to help solve it (or at least put me on the correct track).
Automating Your Deployments

11/14/13

by Mark Huot

Deploying a website to a web server is hard. Not “It’ll take some extra time” hard or “We’ll need some help” hard. It’s “Get a whiteboard and plan out the thing A Beautiful Mind-style” hard. It’s easy to look at your code, look at your server, and just drag/drop files to production. It’s a lot more difficult to set up an automated system that will do that for you.

At Happy Cog, we work in a variety of technical situations, and our deployment strategies must be extensible enough to suit each and every need. We deploy to Windows servers and to *nix servers. In some situations, we deploy code as well as content. We deploy PHP websites on some servers and Ruby web workers on others.
Fall Back to the Cascade

10/24/13

by Cat Farman

When we think of responsive design, we typically focus on newfangled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. But, as front-end developers, we still need to account for older browsers that can’t handle the newest CSS3 techniques when rendering our sites. In the case of responsive design, that means our old friend Internet Explorer 8 (and below) needs some extra handholding when we build our sites with media queries. These browsers don’t support media queries, and since they are still in widespread enough use that we can’t ignore them (~10% of users are still using IE8), we have to come up with new techniques for gracefully degrading our sites.
Dear CSS3

10/17/13

by Yesenia Perez-Cruz

When Dan Cederholm introduced us that spring afternoon at An Event Apart in 2010, I took one look at you and thought, “What a dreamboat.” I knew you were going to change my life. We took things pretty slow at first—I experimented with button and gradient generators while marveling at your features. “You mean, no more cutting gradient background images? And wait, I can just round those corners however I want?!” At the time, my exploration focused on replicating classic Photoshop effects. I had no idea that that was just a small part of what you could do. Since then, you’ve brought so much adventure into my life, creating effects that I could never dream up in Photoshop.
The Web on the Web’s Terms

10/3/13

by Brandon Rosage

After finishing journalism school, I worked for a series of terrific newspaper and radio companies. Barely two years into it, after flirting with the web, I quit.

Compared to the web, print and radio had limited reach and were clumsy to use. In print, we plugged content into a fixed canvas and delivered the same experience to every reader. The closest we got to flexibility was an evening edition or special insert. The web attracted me because it couldn’t have been more different. It challenged me to design and build something that can reach anyone on any web-browsing device—a cause worthy of committing my career to.
Release the Devs

8/29/13

by Allison Wagner

“At Happy Cog, process is not sacred.”

I wrote that in my very first Cognition article way way back in 2011. Everything at Happy Cog is changing as we speak. Next week, our Philly location moves to a shiny new office. We’ve added lots of new hires, but our passion for process remains consistent. We’re constantly revisiting the best way to do things. Our business and the technologies that support it move at a lightning pace. To remain competitive and effective, our process evolves in tandem.

Development

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