Bendyworks Blog

Let Us Dismantle the Artifice of Standup

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published at valerieburzynski.com

For the uninitiated, "Standup" is a metaphoric title given to a daily team meeting where all attendees stand. The intent of this is to hasten the meeting while achieving an objective: to have the team discuss...

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How to Get Your Capybara System Tests Running in a Docker Dev Container on Apple Silicon

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published at valerieburzynski.com

The Journey Begins

At the end of last year my main work machine was upgraded to a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max processor. I quickly got to work setting up my usual dev environment, then cloned the git project...

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Rails Test Driven Development Fibonacci

noreply@bendyworks.com (Kevin Sage) — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this ongoing series, we're going to explore Rails Test Driven Development by focusing on katas. In the art of Karate, a kata is a form, or choreographed sequence of movements, practiced repetitiously with the intent of making incremental improvement...

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This RegEx Will Change How You Design With Tailwind

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Wed, 18 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This RegEx Will Change How You Design With Tailwind

Are you using TailwindCSS in you project?

… of course you are it's all the rage lately, and everyone’s using it.

Need to change all the color based utilities in your app because you need to...

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Hooked on Phoenix

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello again. Thank you for sticking with me through the first three posts in this series. We are finally to the part that triggered the series in the first place. Phoenix is great at helping us stay focused on the server end of the client-server paradigm...

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Can you hear me now? - Using Phoenix Presence

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the third installment of our series on building a 'Single Page App' with Phoenix LiveView. In this series we are exploring building a highly interactive application that most devs would assume has to be coded in javascript in the browser...

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Getting Started with Phoenix LiveView

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As promised in the first article of this series we are about to embark on a journey to build a collaborative rich text editor widget. In this post we will do all the setup work of starting a new Phoenix LiveView app, adding a Document context and doing...

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Stranded at the Edge

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As an industry we’ve been very focused on frictionless and fast user interactions on the web, and rightly so. We’ve been pushing our tools to the limit for decades. Every turn of the wheel brings progress, but also its own set of weaknesses.

In the...

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The Importance of Small Conversations
And how to make them happen in a remote setting

noreply@bendyworks.com (Grace Malinoski) — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We need relationships in our lives. It’s part of what makes us human. However, in an era of remote work and outside restrictions, how do we make time for the small conversations that we used to take for granted in our lives and on which so many relationships...

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Making Snow Angels in a Brownfield

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking about my last post triggered me to finally read Kill it with Fire by Marianne Bellotti. The book is all about modernizing legacy systems, which is something developers have to do frequently. Often, systems that are working well tend to get...

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Done is a four letter word

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a child, my parents had this concept about words we don't say. We don't say "sh*t" or "d*mn". They called them "four letter words." Kind of silly in retrospect, given all the four letter words we do say. What would the world be without love...

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Happy Holidays From Bendyworks

noreply@bendyworks.com (Grace Malinoski) — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When the end of the year approaches and the weather (depending where you are!) begins to have a snap in the air, the holiday season is near. Here at Bendyworks, the change isn’t personified in an office tree or snacks showing up in the breakroom. That...

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Refactoring Tailwind CSS React Apps with Twin.macro

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jason Stewart) — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why Tailwind is awesome

TailwindCSS is taking the world by storm. It is essentially a set of composable, opinionated utility classes that allows for a consistent set of colors, spacings, sizes, shadows and more. Tailwind gives a developer or designer...

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Notes from ElixirConf 2021 - What's Now and What's Next

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworks is dipping it's collective toes in the Elixir waters. Several of us have been reading, taking courses and building practice apps to become proficient at writing Elixir and using the Phoenix framework. This activity includes sending a contingent...

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Wrangling Complex Rails apps with Docker Part 3 : Testing Rails under Docker

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jason Stewart) — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post in this series, we created a portable development environment with docker-compose. I've noticed that a lot of blog posts and tutorials for Dockerizing Rails apps tend to finish before covering the subject of testing within Docker...

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Hopping into Data Con LA 2021

noreply@bendyworks.com (Derek Houck) — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I really wanted to attend Data Con LA in person this year. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option, thanks to the delta variant of COVID-19 and Americans not being vaccinated at a high enough rate to reach herd immunity. So instead, for the second year...

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Working Remotely: A Look at What Works

noreply@bendyworks.com (Toril Oien) — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the time following the start of the COVID pandemic, Bendyworks transformed from an office-based team of software developers in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, to an all-remote company with employees in half a dozen states. In spite of the many challenges...

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Implementing React Native Responsive Design Part 2 : Adapting

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Building phone apps used to be simpler. There were a small number of phone sizes and an even smaller number of screen sizes to support. Your app always took up the whole screen so developers tended to target particular screen sizes and exact pixel...

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Implementing React Native Responsive Design Part 1 : Limiting and Scaling

noreply@bendyworks.com (Roger Roelofs) — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Phones and tablets come in all shapes and sizes. Now that Mac, Windows and tvOS support is in the works, the variation in screen geometries will only grow even more varied. On the web we have media queries and responsive layouts via Cascading Style...

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Wrangling Complex Rails apps with Docker Part 2 : Creating a docker-compose configuration

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jason Stewart) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In part 1 of this series, we created a Dockerfile that encompasses the Rails portion of our app, now we need to connect it with other services. docker-compose is a lightweight orchestration tool that's perfect for this purpose. I don't recommend using...

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Wrangling Complex Rails apps with Docker Part 1 : The Dockerfile

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jason Stewart) — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most difficult things as a developer when working on a team is onboarding. The process usually goes something like this: Look at the README, install dependencies, realize that something is missing or out of date, ask another developer for...

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Building Reactive Rails applications with StimulusReflex

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jason Stewart) — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Rails is a highly productive, highly opinionated, and very popular framework in which to create monolithic web applications. Due to the dominance of reactive Javascript frameworks such as React and Angular, the monolithic style of creating...

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There and Back Again - A Retention Story

stephen@bendyworks.com (Stephen Anderson) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, an advisor asked me a simple question: "What's Bendyworks' customer retention over the past 18 months?" Truth to tell, I really didn't know, so I decided to go look, expecting a mix. I was surprised to find that every single project was either...

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Case of the Missing Comma

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What The Javascript?

Consider for a moment, the problematic code sample below that unexpectedly evaluates to undefined:

Exhibit A

// for educational purposes only; the following line is a bug
_.get(state ['key1', 'key2'], {});

It's using lodash

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How to Setup Windows for Development: An experiment in using WSL2

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I first heard about Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), I got excited. I hadn't used Windows for development in years. Configuring Node and Ruby on Rails in Linux or on a Mac was easy; so I didn't have much impetus to switch. I'd also heard of...

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Ionic React and Redux

noreply@bendyworks.com (Amy Terry-Penak) — Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Redux is a popular tool which is used to manage application state in JavaScript. Redux is based on three core principles: that application state should be kept in a single store, that the state should only be changed by discrete and well-defined actions...

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Rails in Real Time: Blastoff

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bradyn Glines) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When? Now!

Interactions on the internet today appear to be so fluid and instant. It's becoming more unacceptable from today's user experience perspective to have to refresh the web page when data changes. We want the changes to be reflected instantly...

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Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 6 : Highlight text detections

noreply@bendyworks.com (Vennela Kodali) — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 6/6 of the "Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection" series.

At this point, we have both android and iOS plugins in place and ready to use. In this post, let's flesh out our sample app, ImageReader to use the result from the plugins to obtain...

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Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 5 : Android Plugin

noreply@bendyworks.com (Vennela Kodali) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 5/6 of the "Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection" series.

In the previous post, we walked through how to use our plugin in the sample app, ImageReader. In this post, let's dive into developing our android plugin.

Android Plugin

To use...

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Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 4 : Using the Plugin

noreply@bendyworks.com (Vennela Kodali) — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 4/6 of the "Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection" series.

In the previous post, we cleaned up the web implementation of the plugin and added a shim between our plugin and client code. In this post, let's look into actually using the plugin...

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Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 3 : Web Implementation of the Plugin

noreply@bendyworks.com (Vennela Kodali) — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 3/6 of the "Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection" series.

In the previous post, we created an iOS plugin. In this post, while we aren't quite implementing a web plugin, we'll modify the web plugin to reflect the fact, and also add a shim...

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Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 2 : iOS Plugin

noreply@bendyworks.com (Vennela Kodali) — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 2/6 of the "Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection" series.

In the previous post, we created a skeleton plugin and a sample app (ImageReader) to work with the plugin. In this post, let's dive into creating an iOS Plugin for detecting text...

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Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 1 : Create Plugin

noreply@bendyworks.com (Vennela Kodali) — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In this series of blog posts, I'm going to walk through building a Capacitor Plugin, specifically a Text Detection plugin using CoreML and MLKit. Capacitor plugins are handy when you're writing a Hybrid App with Ionic or a PWA but want...

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JSON API Phase 4: Ember

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Building an Ember App that connects to a JSON API server

Phase 1: Setting up your projects
Phase 2: Designing your API with Swagger and JSON API
Phase 3: Developing an API with Express and Swagger
Phase 4: Building an Ember App that connects...

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Ionic: Bringing Us Closer

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bradyn Glines) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tools, tools and tools

It's good to have different tools to solve different problems or build different types of web applications and websites. This gives developers a lot of power, flexibility, and ability to really squeeze all of the power and potential...

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Bendyworks Goes Remote

noreply@bendyworks.com (Amy Terry-Penak) — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworks has recently been exploring how to better support remote workers, with the end goal of becoming a fully hybrid remote office. We have always supported remote work when necessary or beneficial, but until now we have not supported fully remote...

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Rails 6: Action Text

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bradyn Glines) — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Rails 6 is now out and can be used by the public. In a previous post, I took a look at Active Storage; a new framework bundled with Rails 5.2. The framework highlighted today comes fresh out of the Rails 6: Action Text. We'll be going...

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Maydm Visits Bendyworks

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bradyn Glines) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworks recently had the amazing opportunity to host a small get together for the students of Maydm. Maydm describes themselves as:

Integrating computer science learning, mentorships, & internships through programs that prepare students for...

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Rails 5: Getting Started with Active Storage

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bradyn Glines) — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

When storing static files in Rails, the first toolsets I reach for are 3rd party gems like: CarrierWave or Paperclip (before they deprecated it in favor of Active Storage). Active Storage was introduced with Rails 5.2. Check out the

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A month of Flutter: a look back

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is it. 31 blog posts in 31 days. Writing a month of flutter has been a ton of work but also lots of fun and a good learning experience. I really appreciate how supportive and and positive everyone as been.

Publishing experience

For the series...

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A month of Flutter: the real hero animation

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For the last post before the month's wrap up tomorrow, I wanted to do something more fun: use a hero animation between the home page list and the individual post page.

When I first implemented the Hero animation it never worked going back from a

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A month of Flutter: user registration refactor with reactive scoped model

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I implemented saving new users to Firestore but I wasn't happy with the implementation. So today I refactored everything, well not everything but a lot. There are still areas for improvement but I like the general pattern being used now.

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A month of Flutter: WIP save users to Firestore

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today was supposed to be simple. Take form values, save them in Firestore. It works but the current implementation is messy so I'm going to walk through the work in progress (WIP) code and refactor it tomorrow.

The larger architectural change was...

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A month of Flutter: Firestore create user rules and tests

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When a user signs in with Google I'm going to create a user document in Firestore. Each authenticated user should only be able to create one user document. These documents will eventually be readable by other users so Firestore needs to have server...

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A month of Flutter: set up Firestore rules tests

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One aspect of using Firestore for my data backend means I need to be certain my security rules are configured correctly. Otherwise users might be able to read or write date they shouldn't have access to.

A few days ago I set up Firestore in the server

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A month of Flutter: awesome adaptive icons

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For this festive day of Christmas, I'm going to do something more fun and add a fancy icon. For android I will be using an adaptive icon so that it looks good in any shape and has a nice wiggle of movement.

A big thank you goes to @tommy_emo_ for...

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A month of Flutter: setting up Firebase Firestore

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After a user signs in with Google and registers, their info needs to be saved to a databasee. I'm going to use Firebase Firestore as my backend. Within the birb codebase I'm going to create a server directory and initialize a Firestore project inside...

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A month of Flutter: testing forms

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With the new user registration form in place, it's time to make sure the form is tested and will work as expected.

There are basically five different states that need to be tested.

Default state

This is the view users will first arrive to and here...

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A month of Flutter: user registration form

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After a user navigates to the registration page, they should be able to enter their name and agree to the Terms of Service/Privacy Policy.

I'll start by updating RegisterPage to render a RegisterForm widget that I'll create in a minute. Wrapped around...

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A month of Flutter: navigate to user registration

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With users now being able to sign in with Google, I want to have them confirm their name and agree to a terms of service. To lay the groundwork I'm going to add a placeholder RegisterPage and navigation to it.

This will be my second page, of what...

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A month of Flutter: delicious welcome snackbar

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When a user goes to sign in, they should be told if it was successful. I'm going to do that with a SnackBar widget. Note that the Flutter SnackBar style is out of date with the current Material Design spec.

The code changes are not major but include...

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A month of Flutter: mocking Firebase Auth in tests

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Sign in with Google adds a wildcard to the app: external services. External services are usually avoided in test environments because they create variance and complexity so today I'm going to talk about creating mocks to simulate interacting with these...

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A month of Flutter: Sign in with Google

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Building on the work configuring Firebase Auth for Android and iOS, it's time to go get a user's details. This will be leveraging the already installed google_sign_in and firebase_auth packages.

The big change is the addition of the Auth class.

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A month of Flutter: configure Firebase Auth for Sign in with Google on iOS

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I configured Sign in with Google on Android. Today is more of the same but in iOS land.

From the app directory I ran open ios/Runner.xcworkspace to open the iOS project in Xcode. Then in Xcode I selected "Runner" under "Project navigator...

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A month of Flutter: configure Firebase Auth for Sign in with Google on Android

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I added the sign-in button. Now let's make it do something.

First I'll create a new Firebase project that will be used in development. Once I get ready to publish the app I'll create a production project.

Once the project is created,...

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A month of Flutter: FABulous authentication

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Wouldn't it be FABulous if users could sign in to the app? I agree. I'm planning on using Firebase Authentication via the firebase_auth package but today is all about that FAB.

This implementation is pretty simple. I'm going to create a new StatelessWidget

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A month of Flutter: rendering network images

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

To finish off week two, I'm going to finally render some prim Unsplash birbs.

In PostItem I'll use a Column widget instead of the previous Card widget. Card creates a nice boarder shape for your material but now I don't want any shadows to draw attention...

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A month of Flutter: real faker data

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I left the code base with failing tests because the fixture data stored in a JSON file can't be read in Flutter tests. Today I'm going to complete the move to streamed mock data by switching from static fixtures to dynamic factories in a...

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A month of Flutter: Stream transforms and failing tests

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I've got a Post model with mock data and a StreamBuilder for rendering, it all needs to be wired together.

The main changes I'm making are in _MyHomePageState where I'm replacing the stream of ints with a call to the new _loadPosts method...

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A month of Flutter: rendering a ListView with StreamBuilder

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The data for Birb will be stored in Firebase Cloud Firestore. When looking at patterns to handle getting and rendering data, I decided to go with the StreamBuilder example from the cloud_firestore package documentation. I don't know how well pagination...

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A month of Flutter: post model and mock data

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Now that there is a basic user interface, I'm going to create some mock data to display in it. The mock data will be stored in a JSON file and will include just the basic fields needed right now: id, createdAt, username, imageUrl, and text. For imageUrl

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A month of Flutter: extract post item widget

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I created the PostList widget to display multiple posts at once. It contained the code for rendering both the list and the individual items. As the rendering logic for the individual items is going to get more complex, I'm going to extract...

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A month of Flutter: a list of posts

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I created a widget to display when there are no images available. Today I'm going to create the PostsList widget that will be displayed when there are images.

The widget will use a ListView, in part because I plan to use Firebase Cloud Firestore

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A month of Flutter: no content widget

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With any sort of content site, there is always a chance of having nothing to display. So let's create a NoContent widget to use in that scenario.

For this view I'm using an illustration from the amazing unDraw site. I've choosen the SVG version as...

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A month of Flutter: initial theme

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I don't have a full theme designed yet but I am planning on going in a clean and minimalist direction. So let's take the current default design and clean it up a little.

There are a couple of changes to the code for this theme cleanup. The first...

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A month of Flutter: upgrading to 1.0

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday's announcement of Flutter 1.0 was timed perfectly to follow up on configuring CI. Now it's easy to flutter upgrade with confidence.

$ flutter upgrade
Upgrading Flutter from /home/abraham/Applications/flutter...
From https://github.com/flutter...

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A month of Flutter: continuous linting

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I configured CI. Today, in step with @tpolansk's advice, lets set up linting. For this project we'll start with the analysis options that the Flutter team uses. To download the file I'll run the following command within the root directory...

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A month of Flutter: configuring continuous integration

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When starting a new project I like to automate as much as possible. One of the most important tasks is getting tests running on CI. There are a number of great CI services but for this project I'm going with Travis CI.

Let's take a look at the configuration...

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A month of Flutter: create the app

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The start of any Flutter project involves installing the Flutter SDK and choosing an editor. I'll be using the Linux flavor of the SDK and Android Studio with the Flutter and Dart plugins installed.

Follow the linked instructions to install the Flutter...

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A month of Flutter

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently Uri Shaked wrote an inspiring article about his experience publishing a blog post each day for a month. I've decided to combine his great idea with my goal of becoming a better Flutter developer. For the month of December, I will be building...

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Geolocation with Ionic 3

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jon Major Condon) — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Geolocation is great for adding polish to an app and simplyfying forms. Being able to quickly and easily use it in a project makes it viable for any app. In this video, we show you how to set up Ionic 3 Geolocation. It's a fairly simple setup once...

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Pre-cache for Performance

noreply@bendyworks.com (Pearl Latteier) — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you're on or around tech Twitter, you've already heard: #perfmatters. In this instance, the word on Twitter really is true. Web performance does matter. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that page load times have a real effect on user...

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Drop 20K from your production Angular app

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Replacing core-js with a modern reflect-metadata implementation will shave 20K off of your production Angular bundle.

Lets start with generating a new Angular app using the @angular/cli. The version we are using is 6.1.0.

$ ng --version

[snip]
...

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But First...The Weather (VIDEO)

juniper@bendyworks.com (Juniper Ela) — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A Strong Video Front Coming In

Bendyworks launches its newest video blog series with an intriguing discussion between Will Strinz and Juniper Ela about their work in programming concerning the weather.

Resources

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Slaying a UI Antipattern with Web Components (and TypeScript)

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

<node-package> is a web component that lets you easily embed details about an npm package on your site. To use it you add a tag to your HTML and get a nice bit of UI rendered.

<node-package name="twitter-status"></node-package>

It's a component...

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Live on King Street

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworks' downtown office is the perfect viewing spot for Live On King Street concerts, and this year we're continuing our tradition of partnering with local non-profits to help them raise money. Tickets will be sold at the door and online (links...

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Using Capacitor to Build and Distribute an Elm App

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In Web Components with Ionic 4 and Elm: Promises and Pitfalls I looked at building an Elm app using the new Ionic 4 web components. Despite some rough edges and places where the libraries didn't do an especially good job of sharing control of the DOM...

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A Tale of Four Components

noreply@bendyworks.com (Pearl Latteier) — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There is more than one way to write a web component. You can build a component from scratch or you can rely on one of a growing number of web component libraries. Libraries are great: they handle both the dullest and the trickiest parts, protecting...

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Web Components with Ionic 4 and Elm: Promises and Pitfalls

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Although no firm date has been set, the release of the next version of the Ionic framework is approaching. One of the most exciting changes is the shift to using web components built with Stencil for the "core" of the framework. This promises to free...

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Heading to We RISE Tech Conference

noreply@bendyworks.com (Pearl Latteier) — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I'm thrilled to report that next week I'm heading to the second annual We RISE Tech Conference in Atlanta. We RISE, hosted by Women Who Code Atlanta, features talks by women and their allies of all genders on software development, UX/UI, community...

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PRPL on Rails Part 3: Service Workers

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third of a three-part series on speeding up your Rails application using techniques from the PRPL pattern. Part 1 covers code splitting, part 2 shows you how to optimize rendering, and this part demonstrates pre-caching and runtime caching...

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PRPL on Rails Part 2: Optimize Rendering

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second of a three-part series on speeding up your Rails application using techniques from the PRPL pattern.

Performance Matters

In our previous post, we talked about improving your page load time by splitting your into code bundles and...

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PRPL on Rails Part 1: Code Splitting

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first of a three-part series on speeding up your Rails application load time using techniques from the PRPL pattern.

Performance Matters

According to a Google study, the average website takes 19 seconds to load on a mobile phone over...

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Awesome times at RailsConf

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We had a wonderful time at RailsConf last week. Great people, top-notch content, inspiring ideas, and good fun.

PRPL on Rails workshop

If you couldn't make it to our workshop, PRPL on Rails, all of the resources are online. You can work through...

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Bendyworkers Head to RailsConf

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to be leading a workshop at RailsConf next week. The workshop, called PRPL on Rails, will demonstrate how to bring the performance lessons from the PRPL pattern (Push, Render, Pre-cache, Lazy load) to Rails apps.

Join us at RailsConf...

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JSON API Phase 3: API Server

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATED MAR 2020: Updated code samples to eliminate deprecation warnings for current version of Mongoose, fixed a test name, and adjusted database code to resolve a race condition.

Developing an API with Express and Swagger

Phase 1: Setting...

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JSON API Phase 2: API Design

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATED MAR 2020: Updated indentation in YAML code.

Designing your API with Swagger and JSON API

Phase 1: Setting up your projects
Phase 2: Designing your API with Swagger and JSON API (this post)
Phase 3: Developing an API with Express...

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JSON API Phase 1: Setup

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATED MAR 2020: Updated versions of assumed software and the nvm install command, and moved some Swagger setup steps forward from part 3 to allow swagger to work with the referenced version of Node.

Setting up your projects

Welcome! Today you...

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PRPL on Rails Workshop at RailsConf

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

First we had full stack Rails. Then we had Rails APIs powering Single Page Applications. Now take it to the next level with PRPL Rails. The PRPL (Push, Render, Pre-cache, Lazy-load) pattern condenses the best practices for fast Progressive Web Apps...

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The Ground Is Shifting

juniper@bendyworks.com (Juniper Ela) — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Smartphones and their apps have been around for almost a decade now. The traditional smartphone app, while a convenient tool, still suffers from its original core flaw: it needs to be downloaded. Traditional apps are increasingly expensive and complicated...

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Build a Web Component with Nutmeg

noreply@bendyworks.com (Pearl Latteier) — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You're in love with web components. I know. So am I. Let's not waste time rehearing their benefits and get right to building one. In a previous post, I wrote about building a web component from scratch. This time I'll use Nutmeg, a tool (developed...

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Introducing Intersection Observer

noreply@bendyworks.com (Pearl Latteier) — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Have you written JavaScript to enable infinite scrolling or to lazy-load images that appear below the fold?

If you're like me, you did this by listening for scroll events and requesting an element's scrollTop property or calling getBoundingClientRect...

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Joyful Tech: Angular, Node.js, Performance, and Bad Ideas

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Bendyworks our mission statement is to share joy and success in our craft so every once in a while we like to highlight tech news that makes us joyful. Here are some interesting things we saw from Oct 27th through Nov 3rd.

Version 5.0.0 of...

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Google Closure Guide: Compiling Without Errors

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Google Closure Compiler

Google Closure Compiler is an excellent tool for compiling a huge JavaScript Single Page Application to a ridiculously small production size. Unfortunately, Google Closure's power to produce small production JavaScript is inversely...

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Joyful Tech: GraphQL, Chrome Security, and Firebug

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Saying Goodbye...

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Getting started with Webpack: Source Maps

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

With the rise of Service Workers and performance improvements like cache-control: immutable becoming critical for modern applications. Tooling is increasingly essential for deploying and updating production code in safe and consistent ways.

As tooling...

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The Ionic Eddystone Endeavor

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ryan Corbin) — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For as long as they've been around I've been interested in beacons. Advancing the promise of the traditional RFID, beacons have the advantage of replacing the costly RFID scanner, which kept RFID out of the hands of the general public, with a simple...

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Getting started with Webpack: Dev Server

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Developers want to move fast. 🚀 🚀 🚀 Manually triggering a rebuild of your source code after ever little change is slow and annoying. With the Webpack Dev Server and Webpack watch we can greatly improve our code, build, try cycles. We'll use the existing...

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Ionic Lazy Loading Bonuses

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ryan Corbin) — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ionic Lazy Loading is a meaty topic. There are a ton of options and with the proper configuration you can cause your loading to happen in just about any order you want. New to Ionic 3, Lazy Loading won’t reduce the workload, but it will allow you...

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Getting started with Webpack: TypeScript

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you're starting a new web project these days, someone on your team is probably pushing for Webpack and TypeScript. Let's kick off with a little what's what.

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Webpack

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Bendyworks Featured on Madison Noteworthy

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ashley Powell) — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We were SO excited to be featured by madisonNoteworthy!

"On this madisonNoteworthy FEATURE EPISODE, we highlight Bendyworks, a web and mobile app software development company located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Brandon Williams sits down with...

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Most Innovative Company Finalists... Again!

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ashley Powell) — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For the second year in a row, we are a finalist for the Most Innovative Company Award, given by the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.

We are so excited to join the ranks of great companies that are making waves in Madison and Beyond. The other...

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Bendyworks Earns Gold from Bike League

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We're thrilled to announce that the League of American Bicyclists awarded us the Gold level as a Bicycle Friendly Business! We've worked hard to make our workplace friendly to bicyclists of all sorts, and special thanks goes to Ryan Corbin, our Bicycle...

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You Know, For Kids

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ashley Powell) — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

One of the core values at Bendyworks is to do whatever we can to bring underrepresented groups into tech. It fits well with our mission statement: SHARE JOY and SUCCESS in our CRAFT.

Over the past year or so, we've jumped at opportunities to talk...

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The Bendyworks Conference Roadshow Late 2017

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We're ending 2017 with another strong conference showing. Bendyworkers are giving 21 presentations at 15 events in 10 cities and 1 ocean. Topics include Web Components, Twitter API, Progressive Web Apps, Material Design, salary negotiation and Google...

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Building Dynamic Forms in Ionic 2

noreply@bendyworks.com (James Corey) — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At Bendyworks we've been working on growing our in-house expertise in Ionic. In this blog I'm going to go over one of the more complex form structures available in Ionic 2, displaying dynamic options, and show you how to implement it!

Form Needs

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Elm on Rails 5.1 with Webpacker

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 15 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Elm, the new hotness in front-end programming, is now (almost) officially supported in Rails 5.1 via the webpacker gem. The Elm language provides strong type-checking in an immutable, functional programming language that compiles down to JavaScript...

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Make a Native Web Component with Custom Elements v1 and Shadow DOM v1

noreply@bendyworks.com (Pearl Latteier) — Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Say you have a little form or widget that you use in several different places across your website or in several different projects. You want all the instances to have consistent style and behavior, but you also want them to have some flexibility. Maybe...

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Video Messaging in Rails

noreply@bendyworks.com (James Corey) — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We've been working with our friends at the Chins Up Foundation to develop an innovative application connecting youth with college athletes through a pen-pal mentorship program. Recently, we were requested to add video messaging to the application...

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We ♥ Progressive Web Apps II

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Back in December, we raved about Progressive Web Apps – modern web apps that have native mobile features like instant loading, homescreen icons, offline access, and push notifications.

Now you want to make one, right? Well, okay! We're going to show...

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The Bendyworks Conference Roadshow Early 2017

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We're kicking off 2017 with a bang. Six Bendyworkers are giving 17 presentations at 13 events in 10 cities in 4 countries and 1 ocean over 6 months. Topics include JavaScript, IoT, immutability, salary, Elm, and the Twitter API. Come and say hi.

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Using HdrHistogram with Ruby

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

TL:DR HdrHistogram is a fast and lightweight tool to record a histogram of your applications performance. It also corrects for the problem of Coordinated Omission. To install it run gem install HdrHistogram

What is HdrHistogram?

HdrHistogram is a...

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Building A Slack Bot With Elixir Part 2

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the first part of this tutorial, we covered the basics of defining, running, and testing a web server in Elixir using Plug and Cowboy. In this part of the tutorial, we'll build on that groundwork to create a Slack bot that fetches and sends out...

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Webpack v2 Quick Start

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

With Webpack 2.x out of the release client phase, we're here with a quick start guide to get your development project running. This guide will guide you through a minimal setup where you will configure webpack and it's webpack-dev-sever. The configuration...

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The Not At All Definitive Guide To Opening PDF Files In Ionic 2

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ryan Corbin) — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Opening PDF’s inside an application is tricky sometimes, but the beauty of Ionic is that a solution is never far out of reach. Despite that bit of enthusiasm the landscape for this problem is often hard to navigate. After a project where we had to...

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The Tragedy of Maybe and Ruby

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

"How is this different from nil?" is the inevitable question I get from rubyists upon learning about the Maybe monad. Until a flash of inspiration the other day, I didn't quite have a good explanation for this question. Sure, I had an explanation,...

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Installing Ruby on Rails Edge with Bundler

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you want to check out the latest commits to Ruby on Rails before it's made into an official release. Generally installing Rails is as simple as gem install rails but getting the latest code committed to the rails/rails master branch is a...

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Programmatically accessing ClojureScripts Externs Inference

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR: As of release 1.9.456 ClojureScript can infer externs preventing the clobbering of third party JavaScript libraries. We can retrieve the inferred externs programmatically which allows us to create our own custom externs file.

What are externs...

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Building A Slack Bot With Elixir Part 1

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Having started out as a Rails shop, Bendyworks is always on the lookout for new tools that give use the same combination of power and developer friendliness. We've been watching Elixir grow in popularity in the last few years, and are attracted to...

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Bendyworks Featured in Widen Connectivity Report

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Widen, a digital asset management product company, knows what it takes to keep companies connected. Their software allows geographically, departmentally, and skillfully diverse individuals at companies collaborate and share photos, illustrations, videos...

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Optimizing Your CI and WebPack Builds

noreply@bendyworks.com (Valerie Burzynski) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I was running into issues where the builds for a Node project were becoming painfully slow. Local development builds would take well over a minute or more. The CI builds on Jenkins would take at least eight and a half minutes, but would usually...

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We ♥ Progressive Web Apps

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This fall, we’ve had the great fortune to learn and speak about Progressive Web Apps at conferences around the world. We think PWAs are pretty PWAsome! In this post we’ll tell you why, and in a future missive we’ll delve into the technical features...

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Elm for the Frontend, Right Now (Updated for Elm 0.18)

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The following article was originally written in July 2015 for the 0.16 release of the Elm programming language. It has been rewritten here in November 2016 to comply with the syntactic and semantic changes of Elm 0.18. Enjoy!

The Changelog recently...

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Bendyworks Featured in WI Real Estate Blog

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ashley Powell) — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We had a great article written in Wisconsin Real Estate, about how the way we do business creates a powerful result for our clients. Check it out!

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The Bendyworks Conference Roadshow 2016

noreply@bendyworks.com (Abraham Williams) — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The fall is always a busy time of year. Visiting family, pressing cider, eating pie. Here at Bendyworks we are rapidly rolling into full conference season. Check out these presentations coming to conferences near you.

TL;DR: 4 Bendyworkers giving...

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August Bendynews!

noreply@bendyworks.com (Ashley Powell) — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It seems like Bendyworkers are always out and about doing amazing things in the Madison community and beyond. I thought I’d start sharing what we’re up to and where we’ve been. It’s exciting stuff!

This has been a busy couple of weeks: it was Madison...

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Parallelizing HTTP Requests in Clojure

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been working our way through Clojure for the Brave and True and enjoyed solving Exercise 2 from Chapter 10 so much that we’d like to share our solution with you!

The problem

For context, the exercise asks us to consume some data from an API...

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Leveling up Clojure’s Hash Maps

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR: We implemented the Lean Hash-Array Mapped Trie (HAMT) in ClojureScript (see here: https://github.com/bendyworks/lean-map) and have seen performance improvements of 2x in iteration, 2–4x in hashing the map, and an order of magnitude in equality...

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Meetings and You

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Wilson sent out a short missive back when he was a Bendyworker titled “Meetings and You.” In it, he offers a “refresher on Meetings 101.” In the interest of improving meetings everywhere, here it is reproduced (with permission) in its entirety...

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A tale of two selectors in HTML and CSS

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the course of normal web development we're used to encountering weird quirks of various browsers, but this one left us flabbergasted. The root of the problem was using document.querySelectors for HTML elements with ids that had leading numbers....

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Rails Enum is a Sharp Knife

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When we say something "is a sharp knife," we mean that it is eminently valuable if used correctly, and exceptionally hazardous when wielded incorrectly or without effective training. It's similar to the Principle of Least Astonishment, but with a harmful...

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Elm for the Frontend, Right Now

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: This article was written for Elm 0.16 and is now out of date. Many of the concepts discussed in this article were removed in the upgrade to 0.17, and some of the Elm syntax was changed in the move to 0.18. Please read the article we rewrote for...

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Using Linux C APIs in Swift: Glob

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

With Apple's announcement that Swift is coming to Linux, it's time to think about how Swift can be leveraged as a system language rather than simply an app language.

In order to function as a systems language, we need an easy interface to the primitives...

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AngularJS and Rails Donuts

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Interested in mocking up a modern-looking interface to some data? Using AngularJS to interact with an existing Rails project makes it easy to go from a plain old CRUD app to a modern, surprisingly full-featured UI.

CRUDdy Angular Donuts

For instructive...

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Haskell's New Packaging Tool, "Stack"

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

FPComplete recently announced a new tool for working with Haskell projects, stack. Stack is a direct response to a big reported thorn in the side of anyone using Haskell, namely, working with cabal. There have been previous efforts in this area. The...

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The Scenic Route to Becoming a Designer: A Story of Leveraging One's Life Journeys

noreply@bendyworks.com (Kelly Rauwerdink) — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My interest and exposure in design started from a young age. My father and mother have been running a sign company for 40 years. They make hand...

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Cut & Paste Rich Text with Pandoc and Markdown

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I love the plain-text goodness of Markdown for taking notes and writing documentation. Most of the tooling in my world plays nicely with it and so almost all is well. GitHub will render Markdown READMEs and other documents handsomely. Heck, they even...

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Frank on Fire: Getting Started with Sinatra and Ember-CLI

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Here at Bendyworks, we've noticed Ember.js's growing adoption in the front-end community and have found that it strikes a good balance between flexibility and adherence to battle tested architectural practices.

Ember-CLI takes things one step further...

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Writing a Haskell API Server, Part 4

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Tue, 23 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Show me the code!

If you’ve been following along with the blog posts (parts: one, two, and three) then you’ll know quite a few details about how the project works. The last piece, obviously, is how it all fits together. So we’re open sourcing the...

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Guarantee Authentication via Haskell's Type System

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jon Childress) — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Writing a Haskell API Server, Part 3

In part 1 of our series on writing a JSON API in Haskell, Chris and I discussed fully utilizing the database in an application. In part 2 we proceeded to closely mirror our domain logic using Haskell types and...

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Writing a Haskell API Server, Part 2

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Making the Domain Work for You

Back in part 1 we spent a fair amount of time working to make sure that as much of the low-level data logic of our Haskell api server was kept in the database as possible. Things like auto-incrementing ids, created_at...

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Caravan: Ruby API Versioning & Enforcement

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So you’ve built a Ruby API. Awesome sauce! You’ve set yourself up for success whether you build a rich client-side JavaScript app or native app. Hell, you could even shove it into a much larger Service-Oriented Architecture cluster. Nice.

But something...

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Actually Using the Database

noreply@bendyworks.com (Jon Childress) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Writing a Haskell API Server, Part 1

Chris Wilson‘s and my mission for Bendyworks was ostensibly simple: build a secure database-backed API server in Haskell. We didn’t expect to be treading new-ish ground. When we began architecting, we could’ve...

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The Iconic Madison – Free Icon Set

noreply@bendyworks.com (Kelly Rauwerdink) — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As a treat to the upcoming homecoming, Bendyworks would like to issue our very own Madison themed icon set for all of you to enjoy. We tried to capture the nature of our fine city in twelve icons. This is inspired by the sights and places in between...

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2014 Rails Rumble

noreply@bendyworks.com (Mic Funk) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We just completed the 2014 Rails Rumble. We built an app called Gatherings for coordinating Game and TV viewing nights with friends.

More details coming soon!

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The Old and the New: SOAP and Ember.js

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We don’t always get to choose the technologies we have to deal with everyday. I, for one, would love to be using an iPhone 9 right now, but it seems Apple hasn’t yet invented it. Despite it being 2014, some of us have to deal with SOAP every day and...

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Two Keynote tips that everyone should know

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As a frequent speaker, I hook my laptop up to strange projectors that my laptop has never seen before. I also need to get my presentation working quickly as any delay or perceived technical problems set a poor tone for the presentation and stress me...

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Transducers: Clojure's Next Big Idea

peter@bendyworks.com (Peter Schuck) — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Recently Rich Hickey announced transducers for Clojure, the next big idea in Clojure after reducers.

In Clojure, we often work with collections in various types of sequences (lazy or not), and core.async channels. The workhorse functions in Clojure...

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Why We Can't Wait for Madison+ Ruby

noreply@bendyworks.com (Amy Unger) — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

August in Madison always brings a buzz of excitement for Madison+ Ruby. In just 10 days we will welcome members of the international Ruby community to our hometown (we’re honored!).

Madison+ Ruby has set a high bar for Ruby conferences ever since...

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BendyConf: Tech Education for the Rest of Us

noreply@bendyworks.com (Glynnis Ritchie) — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

BendyConf 2014: "Tech Education for the Rest of Us" by Betsy Lorton from Bendyworks on Vimeo.

Dev Bootcamp is one of many programs to crop up in the last few years offering an intense, immersive educational setting where those with or without experience...

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Tessel: A First Look at JavaScript on Hardware

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

When a small red circuit board called the Tessel appeared on a crowd-funding site over a year ago, its promise to bring simplicity to hardware hacking caught my eye. It’s now on the market and, with a project percolating in my mind, I ordered one to...

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Externally Embedding Ember

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been playing around with Ember since before it was extracted from SproutCore, and it wasn’t until recently that we got this unusual request from one of our clients: “Can you embed an Ember app in an external page like you would Google Analytics...

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BendyConf: A Paean To Plain Text

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

BendyConf 2014: “A Paean To Plain Text” by Chris Wilson from Bendyworks on Vimeo.

In this day and age of rich documents with multimedia features, what can we say about plain text? Is there any place for it any longer?

In this ~~talk~~ poem Chris suggests...

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BendyConf: Bad Estimating Games

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Estimation is a crucial but challenging element to managing any software project. Without estimates, we can’t say what stories (or features, in our lingo) are in scope or not in scope for a given development phase. At the same time, the process of...

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BendyConf: One Art Please

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A guy walks into a web shop.

I’m thinking of starting a travel blog,” he says.

“I’m sure you’ll need a logo.”

“Oh, a logo? Can you make me one of those?”

And so begins the act of arting, as Bendyworks designer Kelly Rauwerdink calls it, a black...

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A Non-SEO’s View of MozCon: Day Three

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not an SEO. Until MozCon, I didn’t realize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) could be used as a job title. I knew that keywords and links are important for building site traffic, but meeting over a thousand people at MozCon whose entire careers...

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Why Clojure?

noreply@bendyworks.com (Devin Walters) — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Clojure has been growing in popularity since its first major release in 2008. If you or your company is interested in understanding the value of Clojure at a high level, read on.

Clojure might be the answer if:

Your existing application is written...

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A Non-SEO’s View of MozCon: Day Two

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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A Non-SEO's View of MozCon: Day One

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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"Technology is a black box to me."

noreply@bendyworks.com (Cea Stapleton) — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Stuff

When we speak to prospective clients or when we explain what we do to people we meet, they often tell us that they don’t understand technology or software. We hear a range of comments from, “I don’t know that much about tech” to “I’m so software...

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Ruby? Rails? Ruby on Rails?

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post is one in a series of blog posts that answer some of the most common questions we get from prospective and current clients. All of the posts in this series are under the Questions tag if you want to view more like this.

As a consultancy...

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BendyConf: Introduction To Firefox OS

noreply@bendyworks.com (Will Strinz) — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Josh’s BendyConf talk introduced us to Firefox OS, an open source, web focused mobile operating system developed by Mozilla. Although it has been available for more than a year, this June marked the release of version 2.0, making now a good time to...

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BendyConf: Share, Learn, Enjoy

noreply@bendyworks.com (Cea Stapleton) — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

We believe it’s important that companies provide a forum for employees to share their passions, learn about a diverse array of topics, and enjoy the company of their coworkers. For us at Bendyworks, a big way we do that is through our internal conference...

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Velocity and Working Software

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Four inches per minute. Two hundred forty miles per seven years. One and a half millimeters per second. Even without something to compare to, most would consider this an inordinately slow pace. And yet this is the average velocity of an engineering...

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BendyConf: The Internet Is Your New Database

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In his talk The Internet Is Your New Database, Will laid bare the ideas behind the semantic web. While usually shrouded in misunderstanding, the semantic web has lots of cool ideas packed in it.

Triples

Will started with the simple notion of a...

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Towards Safe, Welcoming Conferences and Communities

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For a while now, Bendyworks has offered its employees an annual budget of $1,000 for attending conferences. Travel, lodging, tickets… if it relates to attending a conference, we’ve got our team covered. And if a Bendyworker is speaking at the conference...

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Music atop the MMoCA

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Can’t get enough summer tunes? We certainly can’t, and so we’ve partnered with a number of local businesses to bring more music al fresco to our fine city.

ELEVATE, a free concert on the roof of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, places beautiful...

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Swift Syntax Highlighting Workaround for Blogging

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Since Swift was announced less than one week ago, we as a community can’t reasonably expect syntax rules to be pulled into popular highlighting libraries like Pygments yet (though it’s certainly already in the works). You’ll notice in our most recent...

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Unit Testing in Swift

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Swift, being all the rage these last four days, has definitely livened up our programming chat room quite a bit. With cautious optimism, we (Betsy and Brad) delved into the Xcode beta, curious about the state of testing with Swift. For the purposes...

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Conference Review: BayHac 2014

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended BayHac 2014, the Bay Area Haskell Hackathon, and I wanted to cover some of my impressions from the conference. I’m breaking it down by the days and the things that I attended. There’s a ton more on the event page linked above for...

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Keeping up with Bendyworks

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In our neighborhood spring has arrived. For us here in Wisconsin, that means we crawl out of our frost caves and igloos and offer sacrifices of cheese to the Sky-serpent so that he regurgitates Sky-orb for the summer. Also there’s lots of road construction...

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Sponsorship spotlight: Ashe Dryden and Diversity in Tech

noreply@bendyworks.com (Glynnis Ritchie) — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout the year, Bendyworks contributes to a number of community-based events including meet-ups, conferences, and even a summer concert series that takes place just outside our office on King Street. This year we’re also sponsoring individuals...

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Sharing lessons learned

noreply@bendyworks.com (Amy Unger) — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There are always many projects happening at Bendyworks, and while we’re a curious and talkative bunch, often our developers and designers don’t have the full picture of what’s happening in other projects. Our main way of sharing project knowledge has...

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UW Big Data Event presents Storm

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

After hearing from a friend in the Madison Big Data Meetup that Twitter would be sending its engineers to the UW Madison CS Department to talk about Apache Storm, a group of Bendyworkers bundled up against the cold and made the short trek to the UW...

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Single Responsibility Principle & iOS

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

View Controllers in iOS: we need to talk. You are—without a shadow of a doubt—the worst offender of the Single Responsibility Principle, and that needs to stop.

First, some background

The Single Responsibility Principle or SRP, is defined by Robert...

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From Ruby to Haskell, Part 3: Lazy Evaluation

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the defining characteristics of Haskell— that you often see listed in what sets it apart from other languages— is that it is the only common language that’s lazy. In fact, laziness has been cited as the feature that keeps Haskell functionally...

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The Migrationless Migration

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading the excellent blog Revision-Zero lately, and just a whole bunch of other relational algebra stuff. If I may impose upon you for a minute, relational algebra is one of those things that, like linear algebra, is a shining intellectual...

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2014 Letterpress cards with Flying Rabbit Press

noreply@bendyworks.com (Glynnis Ritchie) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year, from Bendyworks and Flying Rabbit Press from Bendyworks on Vimeo.

This year we went analog with our holiday card. We got our hands dirty with Kate Clapper of Flying Rabbit Press to document the unique process that is letterpress–from...

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Get your very own Bendyworks 2014 desktop calendar

noreply@bendyworks.com (Glynnis Ritchie) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In an industry where paper feels like an artifact of a bygone era, we decided a little tactility and handmade detail would be a welcome change of pace. After months of illustrating and distilling Bendyworks’ values into some sparkly copywriting, we...

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Join us for Global Day of Code Retreat!

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Mark your calendars! Bendyworks will be hosting the Global Day of Code Retreat on Saturday, December 14th. What’s a code retreat, you ask?

A code retreat is a programming event that focuses on honing your skills. You take time out from your usually...

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Design Support for Wisconsin Media Lab

noreply@bendyworks.com (Kelly Rauwerdink) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A fresh perspective is critical to taking design from good to great. An outsider can give input to help tweak elements until all the images dazzle and animations flow smoothly.

That’s what Mic and I did for the Wisconsin Media Lab’s Wisconsin Biographies

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ON AN ON B-Sides: Ghosts

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a foggy week here in Madison, folks. We’re all about matching our music to our mood, which meant it was perfect that Jonk Music posted this video of Ghosts from last month’s B-Sides with ON AN ON. No matter the weather where you are, take a listen...

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What can SQL do for you?

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What can SQL do for you? Chris shares his thoughts on the changelog on how to take full advantage of relational databases:

Where is the place that I can look and see a coherent overview of the parts of my system? In conventional Rails, I think...

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B-Sides: ON AN ON

noreply@bendyworks.com (Rachel Keranen) — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Chicago-based ON AN ON was named the number one band to see at SXSW 2013 by Time magazine. We couldn’t make it to Austin to verify that ourselves, but we’ve been playing them over the communal Bendywaves this past week in anticipation for their appearance...

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No one knows everything, and that's okay

noreply@bendyworks.com (Glynnis Ritchie) — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As Bendyworks’ latest apprentice it’s easy to forget that no one knows everything. My journey as a developer began just 20 months ago, and with a background in French language and photography, it hasn’t always felt like the easiest transition. However...

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Bwoken 2 Beta Released

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In response to a great discussion in the bwoken issues forum, I’m happy to announce the first beta of bwoken version 2! The major change, which justified the major version bump, is that bwoken is no longer invoked with rake but instead with bwoken

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ConcertCam

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine yourself at a concert on the streets of Madison, a block away from the Wisconsin State Capitol (known for, among other things, being the largest granite dome in the world), listening to Willy Porter, and waiting for the headliner—Eric Hutchinson

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Improv at Bendyworks

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When you’re pitched a four dimensional water bottle, a baby’s first mace, or completely opaque windshields, you might want to stop and wonder how you found yourself in that position. While this isn’t exactly a common situation at Bendyworks, it certainly...

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It's Growth Day at Bendyworks

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Bendyworks Growth Day]1 from StoryFirst Media on Vimeo.

Here at Bendyworks we take Fridays for personal, professional and company growth. We think growth days are vital to stay engaged with the open source community...

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Announcing B-Sides

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworks is happy to announce that we’ve partnered with some great folks to bring you more access to the Madison music scene.

The Majestic Theatre has been bringing national touring acts to our area for the last five years and has supported the...

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Give Yourself a Security Makeover

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

While visiting Twilio for a day on my two-week programming pilgrimage I learned that I’ve been pretty insecure. Joël Franusic (@jf) explained that I needed a security makeover. You probably do too! So let’s get started. Follow the suggestions as you...

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Lists out of lambdas and boxes out of functions

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a cool article by Steve Losh called List out of Lambda that reminded me, in a really good way, of a section in SICP. If you want to read the boiled-down scheme version that’s in SICP, here it is: SICP section 2.1.3. What follows is my paraphrasing...

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From Ruby to Haskell, Part 2: Similarity, Refactoring, and Patterns

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a while since I last wrote one of these posts and I didn’t want to leave people sitting by their computer desks forever, waiting with bated breath for the next one to pop up in your Google Reader feed (…whispers from the Internet…), okay...

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You Don't Know Your Visitors, So Stop Pretending

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1: What is analytics really?

Web analytics should hurt a little. Not just the pain of seeing your low traffic revealed in hard numbers, but the realization that you don’t really know your visitors.

We programmers tend to be preoccupied by our...

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Styleguide Rails

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

You might as well learn it now, because you’ll be using it in 6 months. Styleguide rails is a cool gem that builds a living, breathing styleguide for your site. You can add it to your project really easily (let’s just do it right now):

gem install

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Programming Pilgrimage

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In August 2012 I resolved to become a world-class web developer in one year and to share my progress and discoveries along the way. I challenged myself with the task of learning a new programming topic every two weeks, blogging about what I learned...

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Playoff Radio Spot

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworks origins in Madison, WI means that we are football fans. With Green Bay in the playoffs we were able to try out a new advertising medium.

Take a listen to our ad below or listen to WIBA AM or FM during today’s game.

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Customer Quote: Centro

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Centro’s experience with Bendyworks was very positive. The developers we worked with were able to jump right into a complex code base and quickly contribute quality code to an ongoing project. Everyone was smart, pragmatic, and fun to work with.”...

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From Ruby to Haskell, Part 1: Testing

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You read that right. Or maybe, if you read it as “stop using Ruby and start using Haskell”, you read it wrong. I’m going to show you why I find Haskell to be utterly fascinating and eminently practical.

Foremost, I want to collect some bits and pieces...

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Getting Plan 9 running on the Raspberry Pi

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

More Unix than Unix

Do you like Unix? Do you really like Unix? Well, what if I told you there’s a little-known operating system out there that’s more Unix than even Unix is. Cool, right?

Well it is true! Plan 9 occupies an interesting niche in the...

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Testing Security with Brakeman

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Security in web applications is not something developers discuss often enough – some think of it as a taboo subject, or something the NOC guys have to deal with. Some treat security as a post deployment afterthought. Sometimes little thought is given...

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The Isthmus: Bendyworks' Big Idea

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Madison’s Weekly Newspaper, Isthmus, picked up a story from local freelance journalist Marc Eisen. The story, one in a series on Madison’s Next Economy, focuses on Brad Grzesiak’s idea of creating a tech corridor on the East Side of Madison.

Several...

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OMG! Rails Rumble!

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend, three Bendyworkers and a Swink-person (Swink-ee?) participated in the Rails Rumble, a competition to build a web application in just 48 hours. Rather than hacking on the backend like I usually do, I ended up almost exclusively forging...

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Moldover: Godfather of Controllerists

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I was able to attend a workshop at Madison Media Institute featuring Moldover and his crazy custom mixers and modified instruments such as the Robocaster. At the end of the night I was so impressed I twisted his arm until he came to Bendyworks...

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Cthulhuian Document Preparation With Troff

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr: If you are looking for a lightweight document preparation system in the style of LaTeX, try out troff which is probably already on your system.

Intro

Lurking deep in UNIX, even on your shiny new Mac, is the eldritch horror of troff. It waits...

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Don't Say 'Emacs' or 'Vi'

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A brief tour of some other editors

Quick, think of your favorite $EDITOR. If you’re anything like me or the people I work with, you’ve got a horse in this race. And again, if you’re anything like myself or my comrades, you’ll probably say Emacs or...

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Version Control for Poetic Time Travelers

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew McCullough (@matthewmccull) leads Git workshops across the world. He recently visited Madison, Wisconsin to discuss and demonstrate advanced topics such as rerere merging, the reflog, interactive rebase, cherry-pick, show-branch, branch filtering...

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Your Papers, Please

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes a line of discussion will open up into areas of unexpected intensity. Suddenly people are vehement and they won’t let go. When that happens, it’s interesting, and it might mean something.

This happened at Madison Ruby (#MadisonRuby) during...

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RailsBridge: a Difference That Makes A Difference

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So, there’s this conference in town this week.

It’s going to be damned good: attend if you can. One of the most remarkable parts of it is the RailsBridge Women’s Outreach Workshop being offered on Wednesday evening and during the day on Thursday....

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The Hidden Life of Stylesheet Preprocessing

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Like any piece of art, a stylesheet should be indivisible and bold, but natural. It should arrive to the browser in one elegant file, a succinct connection between page semantics and presentation. Preprocessing distances a stylesheet from the Sturm...

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Growth day happenings – Friday the 13th

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

(This is the first of a recurring series describing our work during most, if not all, growth days at Bendyworks. Note that we won’t do growth day on Friday the 20th, because it’s UXMad.)

What’s a “Growth Day”?

Bendyworks invests in our developers...

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Don't Play CSS Tetris

noreply@bendyworks.com (Joe Nelson) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Want to see the future?” Dale Sande (@anotheruiguy) leaned toward me with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye. His laptop was crowded with code and design layouts. He proceeded to show me that I have been doing CSS all wrong.

My first mistake is using...

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What are we doing over the next few weeks? 2012-07-09

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What’s coming up the rest of the month?

The major event is clearly UXMAD.

This is a premier user experience conference for a decidedly less than premium price. Thursday the 19th there will be hands-on workshops; Friday the 20th and Saturday the...

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Bwoken Version 1.1 Released

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Version 1.1 of Bwoken has just been released! This feature release includes the ability to run UIAutomation tests on a device rather than the simulator, in addition to a number of internal improvements to Bwoken.

Developers we come across have always...

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Respond With An Explanation

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Using respond_to and respond_with is, as Rails tends to be, Convention Over Configuration™. This is a wonderful thing, but proficiency requires an understanding of these conventions which, in the case of respond_with, may be less than intuitive. What...

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Craftsman Swap Podcast

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Bendyworkers Devin and Chris were recently interviewed on the Relevance podcast. They sat down to speak with Craig Andera, Jared Pace, and Alan Dipert of Relevance, on the topic of our recent craftsman swap.

Back in March, Chris Wilson visited Durham...

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Introducing Bwoken

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Bwoken is a UIAutomation test runner for both iPhone and iPad, which lets you write your tests in CoffeeScript, then run them in bulk from the command line. Watch the video, then head on over to its homepage!

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Local development team grows with new Bendyworks mentorship program

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The software industry faces a pressing issue: we just can’t find enough seasoned developers.

Universities may produce excellent computer scientists, but recent grads are typically short on practical knowledge and experience.

Regardless of pedigree...

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George Boole Returned As a Zombie and is Gnawing on My Brain

noreply@bendyworks.com (Chris Wilson) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is about that oft-neglected corner of programming, the humble boolean. Perhaps, by thinking about what’s going on in many boolean expressions, we can iron out his quickly-forking complexity. And, oh, what luck! Here’s a slab of boolean logic that...

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Mobile and Professionalism for Students

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, at the request of their teacher Suman Banerjee, I presented a view of what it’s like to be a professional programmer to a class of Computer Sciences students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The focus of the talk was “Mobile & Professionalism...

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All You Need is love.travis-ci.org

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks a milestone for the Travis CI project: it launched a crowd-funding campaign titled love.travis-ci.org to finance a slew of new features. Among the planned additions are private build support, pre-tested Github pull requests, build artifacts...

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Giving back to the community

noreply@bendyworks.com (Matt Gauger) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how Bendyworks has given back to the community in the past week:

Jim recorded an interview with the fine folks at EngineYard about our experiences working with them. Look for the link to the audio soon!

Madison Ruby registration and Call for...

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UIAutomation and Pusher

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

UIAutomation is Apple’s answer to integration tests. It allows you to drive and run assertions against your application using a javascript library that interacts with user interface elements. It’s great to have such a powerful tool, but what if you...

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ConciseKit

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This article was cross-posted from Brad’s personal blog: Naming Things is Hard

Over the last month at Bendyworks, I’ve been pairing with Jaymes on our latest initiative: adding iOS development to our repertoire. As a Ruby developer learning...

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Our first iOS app

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We just launched our first iOS app: TravisCI! It lets you browse and view live updates of builds submitted to Travis-CI.org.

We chose to build a native front end to Travis CI in order to hone our iOS skills while working with a RESTful API. During...

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My Bendyworks Apprenticeship

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I started at Bendyworks on July 18, 2011 as an apprentice. On my first day, Stephen Anderson and I dove right into pressing client work. We always pair program at Bendyworks so I was never “stuck” or “lost.” However, Bendyworks prides itself on using...

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From 0 to 1 Million in 6 Hours

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Having an office less than a block away from a protest that’s making international headlines gave us a unique opportunity: use our technology prowess to experience live events in a new way. So what did we do? We wrote a site using Rails, WebSockets...

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HTML5, AJAX, IE, and Shivs

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Standard procedure for using HTML5 on IE is to use a library like html5shim, html5shiv, or Modernizr. These tools are, in general, quite great. We at Bendyworks tend to use Modernizr.

Unfortunately, something happens when you combine HTML5 elements...

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AtaconApp, Facilitating Conference Participation

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Over the course of 48 hours, Stephen, Brad, Nick and Jaymes cranked out one of the 180 web applications to hit the Internet thanks to the Rails Rumble. The result of their efforts is AtaconApp, an app to facilitate conference participation.

Starting...

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Script to Use Gems Locally, but Not on Heroku

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve already blogged about how heroku and bundler occasionally don’t play nice. Instead of describing an elaborate checklist that doesn’t work in all cases, just do two things.

First, make your Gemfile look something like this:

source :rubygems

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Excluding Dev and Test Gems from Heroku

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Check out our newer blog article that shows a better method of excluding dev and test gems from heroku.

Heroku is awesome. Bundler is awesome. Combining the two… not always awesome. Are you getting this when pushing to Heroku?

You have modified...

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Our Presentations

noreply@bendyworks.com (Brad Grzesiak) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We’re making an effort to post all of our presentations online. Thanks to the magic of jekyll, showoff (sometimes… otherwise probably Keynote), and github, you can now review our talks!

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BarCampMadison

noreply@bendyworks.com (Bendyworks) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings and salutations! Welcome to Bendyworks’ blog. We’ll try to keep this up-to-date with our learnings and happenings. First up: BarCampMadison.

BarCamp, in general, is a type of unconference, where the speakers are not determined ahead of time...

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Bendyworks Blog

Let Us Dismantle the Artifice of Standup

How to Get Your Capybara System Tests Running in a Docker Dev Container on Apple Silicon

The Journey Begins

Rails Test Driven Development Fibonacci

This RegEx Will Change How You Design With Tailwind

This RegEx Will Change How You Design With Tailwind

Hooked on Phoenix

Can you hear me now? - Using Phoenix Presence

Getting Started with Phoenix LiveView

Stranded at the Edge

The Importance of Small ConversationsAnd how to make them happen in a remote setting

Making Snow Angels in a Brownfield

Done is a four letter word

Happy Holidays From Bendyworks

Refactoring Tailwind CSS React Apps with Twin.macro

Why Tailwind is awesome

Notes from ElixirConf 2021 - What's Now and What's Next

Wrangling Complex Rails apps with Docker Part 3 : Testing Rails under Docker

Hopping into Data Con LA 2021

Working Remotely: A Look at What Works

Implementing React Native Responsive Design Part 2 : Adapting

Implementing React Native Responsive Design Part 1 : Limiting and Scaling

Wrangling Complex Rails apps with Docker Part 2 : Creating a docker-compose configuration

Wrangling Complex Rails apps with Docker Part 1 : The Dockerfile

Building Reactive Rails applications with StimulusReflex

Introduction

There and Back Again - A Retention Story

Case of the Missing Comma

How to Setup Windows for Development: An experiment in using WSL2

Ionic React and Redux

Rails in Real Time: Blastoff

When? Now!

Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 6 : Highlight text detections

Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 5 : Android Plugin

Android Plugin

Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 4 : Using the Plugin

Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 3 : Web Implementation of the Plugin

Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 2 : iOS Plugin

Capacitor Plugin for Text Detection Part 1 : Create Plugin

Introduction

JSON API Phase 4: Ember

Building an Ember App that connects to a JSON API server

Ionic: Bringing Us Closer

Tools, tools and tools

Bendyworks Goes Remote

Rails 6: Action Text

Introduction

Maydm Visits Bendyworks

Rails 5: Getting Started with Active Storage

Introduction

A month of Flutter: a look back

Publishing experience

A month of Flutter: the real hero animation

A month of Flutter: user registration refactor with reactive scoped model

A month of Flutter: WIP save users to Firestore

A month of Flutter: Firestore create user rules and tests

A month of Flutter: set up Firestore rules tests

A month of Flutter: awesome adaptive icons

A month of Flutter: setting up Firebase Firestore

A month of Flutter: testing forms

Default state

A month of Flutter: user registration form

A month of Flutter: navigate to user registration

A month of Flutter: delicious welcome snackbar

A month of Flutter: mocking Firebase Auth in tests

A month of Flutter: Sign in with Google

A month of Flutter: configure Firebase Auth for Sign in with Google on iOS

A month of Flutter: configure Firebase Auth for Sign in with Google on Android

A month of Flutter: FABulous authentication

A month of Flutter: rendering network images

A month of Flutter: real faker data

A month of Flutter: Stream transforms and failing tests

A month of Flutter: rendering a ListView with StreamBuilder

A month of Flutter: post model and mock data

A month of Flutter: extract post item widget

A month of Flutter: a list of posts

A month of Flutter: no content widget

A month of Flutter: initial theme

A month of Flutter: upgrading to 1.0

The Importance of Small Conversations
And how to make them happen in a remote setting