Team Roundup #1: 6 Great Web Development Reads
As a developer, one of the essential skills you need is to be able to keep up with what’s going on in web development and the tech industry. We’re big readers at Testomato, so we pulled together a roundup of some of our favorite finds from last month to share with you!
Here are 6 great web development articles we think you should read on your next coffee break:
Improving Smashing Magazine’s Performance: A Case Study
Smashing Magazine had its eight birthday last month! To celebrate, they decided share what they learned about their website from dealing with their biggest performance challenges over the last year and all the hard work they’ve been doing recently to improve. This in-depth case study is full of practical guidance that dives deep on how they optimized their site to achieve a near perfect PageSpeed score!
Stop Writing Automation
We recently stumbled across this great post by Alan Page of The Tooth of a Weasel. He argues it’s not always necessary for testers to write automation anymore and explores the possible role of automation in a test team going forward. There’s also a lot of interesting discussion in the comments, so make sure you check them out if you have time.
5 Typical JavaScript Interview Exercises
What are the 5 most common questions used to test JavaScript skills for a front-end position? Aurelio De Rosa walks you through each exercise in this great SitePoint tutorial. He provides the answers, along with some practical tips and advice to help prepare you for the concepts and topics you can expect when you arrive at an interview.
Games Galore: Building Atari with CreateJS
A basic tear-down of the Atari Arcade and great best practices when it comes to building games with CreateJS. You’ll get an overview of CreateJS, its core capabilities, and an application tutorial complete with examples, demos, and pro tips.
10 Outdated Web Design Techniques to Avoid
Web design changes constantly to try and keep up with new techniques, technologies, and terminology. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep up! This is a great overview from Lukasz Zelezny (uSwitch) about 10 web design techniques that have already passed their expiration date. If you’re still using any of these design techniques on your projects, it might be time for an overhaul.
Jan Prachar: The Dark Side of JavaScript
As our final great read, we thought you might enjoy this popular article from our own blog! Testomato developer Jan Prachar tackles some of the toughest and most common areas of confusion when using JavaScript, including logical operators, the equality operator, semicolons, and more!
Bonus: Jason Fried & Scott Heiferman: Building Businesses That Last
“I like the people who can keep running. That’s what’s interesting to me because I think that’s what’s ultimately really hard to do.”
Jason Fried of Basecamp and Scott Heiferman of Meetup sit down to discuss how to build sustainable growth for the long haul. We really enjoyed this conversation about turning the focus away from rapid growth and scaling, and how to approach entrepreneurship with the idea of celebrating longevity.
What’s the most interesting thing you read last month? We’d love to hear!
Share with us in the comments or on Facebook. You can also find us @testomatocom.
