Author Archives: wfwalker

About wfwalker

examining the unexamined life of software

BirdWalker, then and now

“About time, too. He’s been looking dreadful for days; I’ve been telling him to get a move on.“—Albus Dumbledore about his phoenix Fawkes after Fawkes burst into flame Just as Fawkes periodically must burst into flames and rise again from … Continue reading

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Birdsongs, Musique Concrète, and the Web Audio API

In January 2015, my friend and collaborator Brian Belet and I presented Oiseaux de Même — an audio soundscape app created from recordings of birds — at the first Web Audio Conference. In this post I’d like to describe my … Continue reading

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Highlights of the first Web Audio Conference

I recently had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the first Web Audio Conference, co-sponsored by IRCAM and Mozilla. I wanted to share some of the great things that I learned about there. Meyada, Hugh Rawlinson Meyada is a … Continue reading

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Using Google Maps in a responsive design

[When I’m not in the office, I’m often out birding and photographing birds. To keep track of my life list and bird photos I wrote a Ruby on Rails site hosted at birdwalker.com; you can see all the source on … Continue reading

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Video of my YUIConf talk about open web app development

The YUIConf folks have just posted their recording of a talk I gave there last year. I had planned to talk generally about the Firefox Marketplace, how it differs from other app stores, and how those differences create an overall … Continue reading

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Replacing Google Image Charts with D3.js

[When I’m not in the office, I’m often out birding and photographing birds. To keep track of my life list and bird photos I wrote a Ruby on Rails site hosted at birdwalker.com; you can see all the source on … Continue reading

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DevCon5 — on learning from games, Monty Sharma, Mass Unity

Monty Sharma gave a great talk this morning at DevCon5 about the current trends in games and what the rest of us can learn from them. He centers on three big ideas: Free-to-Play. Find a way to let dedicated users … Continue reading

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jsEverywhere: Apathy is the Enemy of Awesome by Nancy Lyons

Nancy Lyons of geekgirlsguide gives a real end-of-day pep talk about how failed communication and collaboration can kill projects. I’ll put in a few of her zingers and how I understand them: Learn how to talk about what you do … Continue reading

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jsEverywhere: PhoneGap CLI and PhoneGap Build Steve Gill, Adobe

Steve Gill is demoing “Cordova Client”, in which you have command-line tools to build, deploy, and manage Cordova-based applications on Blackberry, Android, and iOS. This is still in beta. It’s at github.com/filmaj/cordova-client. It requires Node.js, should be available in npm.

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jsEverywhere: From Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery by Morten Nielsen

Morten‘s presentation is a hilarious, compelling fable of what happens when a .NET shop relying on manual processes becomes a victim of its own success and ends up with an exploding number of software versions in the field. The fable … Continue reading

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