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Development

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

  1. Pressure 2

    Under Pressure

    Headshot of Anthony Colangelo

    8/22/13

    by Anthony Colangelo

    Deep in the middle of the night, illuminated by the glow of five screens full of graphs, data, code, and live video, I sat on edge, as I monitored a small army of servers. The O Music Awards, a 24-hour, live-streamed music and awards festival in New York City, was in full swing.

    Sometime after 3am, I saw the first warning sign of a major issue—a slight uptick in an otherwise-flat graph. Over the next few seconds, it grew to a huge spike, and I alerted the team that we had a problem. Thanks to some well-configured caching, the homepage and live streams were unaffected, which meant a large majority of users didn’t even know we were having an issue. But, the failures were going to cause errors during voting, and a few other pages on the site were going to crash. The situation wasn’t great, but the mission-critical things were still working properly.

  2. Sweat ks

    Sweat the Small Stuff

    Headshot of Mark Huot

    6/6/13

    by Mark Huot

    Time and time again, we’re told “don’t sweat the small stuff” and focus on the things that really matter. Typically, we hear this when we’re obsessing over a pixel here and a pixel there instead of concentrating on the direction and concept first. Most of the time, this makes sense and is sage advice—except for when it isn’t. At some point in every project, you have to focus on the minutia and work through the small stuff. For me, this typically comes in the implementation phase (and that’s okay).

  3. Hc blog Main Article Illustration SC

    Beyond Binary Grids

    Headshot of Stephen Caver

    12/13/12

    by Stephen Caver

    Grids are everywhere on the web, and there is no hiding from them. We need grid systems to help create grids that are usable and manageable, and with Responsive Web Design, this has been a tricky tightrope to walk. We need our layouts to react to different media query breakpoints, and the way we have built grids in the past needs to be extended to do that.

  4. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v99 00 SS

    Building the Happy Cog Test Lab

    Headshot of Ryan Irelan

    11/1/12

    by Ryan Irelan

    When first planning our test lab, I surveyed my own collection of devices and then asked around our Austin office for people who had some older phones sitting at home in a closet or junk drawer. I was able to pull together a handful of devices, including two older iPhones we tested with during some iOS development work. I purchased the remaining devices.

  5. Hc blog Main Article Illustration

    One Small Step

    Headshot of Anthony Colangelo

    9/27/12

    by Anthony Colangelo

    On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. A few hours later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface—the first time humans set foot on another planetary body. The astronauts were explorers. Yet, if they did not share their experiences, their expedition would have provided no meaningful benefits to anyone but themselves. True exploration isn’t just going somewhere or doing something new; it is experiencing something new and communicating that back to those who care.

  6. Hc blog Main Article Illustration v70 DW

    The Tech Behind Site Week

    Headshot of Ryan Irelan

    3/22/12

    by Ryan Irelan

    In February we gathered a group together in our Philadelphia office to redesign and rebuild our happycog.com website in one week. The goal of our Site Week was to redesign the website (Greg Hoy covers the thinking behind this in a Cognition post back in Janauary) and to push ourselves to do something different.

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