To Bootstrap, or Not to Bootstrap…

We have a new product we’re apparently looking to spin off here at work, and as part of that conversation, someone threw out the words “Twitter Bootstrap“. For those of you not familiar with Bootstrap, it’s a predefined set of (both stylistic and javascript) visual components and layout scaffolding that makes it fairly quick and easy to prototype websites, and is pretty snazzy in appearance to my developer’s eye, though you might hear differently from designers. Continue reading

Modular Widget Design Architecture

I’ve previously mentioned that I work on the Platform team within my current company, as the caretaker of our central UI widget repository. As part of an ongoing effort, we’ve been in talks with our offices in Washington, D.C. about how to share some of the development effort between our teams, and get the most out of the finite front-end engineering resources we have at our disposal. In our most recent round of collaboration, there was some terminology brought up that I really liked as a method of conceptualizing the building of widgets, and how they should relate to each other. It was put into the context of the building blocks of life itself: Elements, Compounds, Cells, and Organisms. Continue reading