Technology
WordPress Tips I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to work on several internal and external WordPress-based R/GA websites. My experience and knowledge of the WordPress CMS has grown with each new project, and here are the tips and tricks that I’ve used most often.
Hackathons: It’s about innovation.
During the last six months members of R/GA’s Buenos Aires (BA) office have participated in a number of hackathons. Hackathons are no longer the geeky playground of full time techies. The best hackathons unite people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to focus participants on interesting, rewarding, and unique problems. This has lead to […]
Stay Away from the Light, Java
A few years ago, Java was eschewed by hipster coders on fixie bikes who sneered at its verboseness and poured scorn on the sclerotic pace of Java development. Sadly, they were right. Java had taken a wrong turn by favoring container-based architectures like JEE, resulting in bloated application servers that doled out centralized services like […]
3 Tips for Effective Markup (from Zero to Hero)
Starting a new layout can sometimes seem intimidating. Translating a PSD into code can be a long process but don’t let it overwhelm you. Just keep these 3 easy steps for organizing your work in mind and deliver a cleaner solution. Visualize your HTML structure with no CSS to ensure the structure makes sense without […]
Bitcoin – libertarian economic dream, geeky fad, or black market nightmare?
Since its theoretical inception in 2008 courtesy of a pseudonymous developer known only as “Satoshi Nakamoto” Bitcoin has gained both interest and notoriety, but does it actually have the potential to become a usable long-term currency? Although Bitcoin is promoted as an “experimental digital currency,” many detractors have cited Bitcoin’s highly volatile exchange rate, inflexible supply, […]
3 Tips for Rolling Your Own SQL Compare Tool with Database Metadata
In most cases a database vendor’s default SQL Comparison tool will do the job, but every once in a while I need a little more (e.g. a tool embedded as part of a continuous deployment process). Luckily I’ve found that it’s not difficult to build my own customized SQL comparison tool if I follow these […]
It’s Time to Get Excited about Out of Store Shopping
Historians credit first century engineer Heron of Alexandria with the design for a machine that dispensed holy water with a coin; now, two thousand years later, global annual sales of products through vending machines is approaching $200 billion. While advanced merchandising and cashless payment are two key growth drivers, the rapid adoption of smart-phones and […]
My Experience Judging “El Hackathon”
Recently I was part of the judging panel for “El Hackathon.” Organized by Latism, the largest community of latinos in social media, this was not only the first hackathon with a focus on the Latino tech community, but also very likely the first one to take place at the Waldorf Astoria. Fellow judges included representatives […]
What you need to Know Before Developing for Google Glass
Recently R/GA’s Prototype Studio launched a bikeshare app for Google Glass as an internal project to explore and understand the Glass product and platform. Along the way we learned that developing for Glass is not at all like developing for mobile. With Glass, Google released the Mirror API—currently the only Google-approved means to build apps for Glass. […]
Sweat the Small Stuff with Sass at CSSConf
In May I was fortunate to speak at CSSConf, one of the first conferences completely devoted to the latest technologies, cutting edge techniques, and tools that front-end developers are using to build the world’s most engaging user interfaces. My talk, “Sweating the Small Stuff”, was about using Sass (a language that extends CSS) to bridge […]
