I am Joseph Rex,
voyaging the boundaries of interfaces and interactions

Joseph is a software engineer at ConvertKit, a creative technologist that loves combining art and engineering, and dad to an over-demanding australian shepherd named Glitch.

Specialist or Full Stack generalist

As a full stack developer I’ve had critiques about how I can’t be good enough at one thing if I do a lot of things. I totally agree to this and I’m not claiming to be a master of everything I do. Some will rather describe it as:

Using Rails assets pipeline with Cloudfront CDN

Performance is an essential thing in every application that should be considered not only from the front-end but also the back-end. CDNs have been a great way to serve and deliver assets on web pages in this advent of HTTP1. It may not be the same with HTTP2.0 but at this, majority of the web is on HTTP1 and it will be that way for years to come. Cloudfront is an Amazon web service that delivers content from nearby locations and it works greatly when combined with the powers of the rails assets pipeline.

Good Citizen: Copyrights and Licenses

A lot of us follow most legal laws to remain good citizens and mostly to stay out of trouble. The best people are those who follow these laws because they feel it’s the right thing to do, and not just because they may get arrested for doing otherwise. In the Software development industry, there are licenses and copyright laws. These laws are ignored by many and I used to be one.

Understanding how ajax upload preview works

From a very early stage of my development, I’ve been fascinated by ajax upload previews and dropzone upload areas. For a long time I guess I was too scared to try any of them but after some time, I started using some jQuery plugins that did the job fine. I could have been contended with that and just have that in my every project but every project aren’t the same. I may use a bunch of plugins on a static website but on web applications where I’m so conscious about performance I prefer taking my time to write code that will help me do away with plugins or gems where I can.

Sticky: Scroll to fix content

Late last year, Chris Coyier addressed this on CSS-Tricks with illustrating images including GIF. In his solution to the problem, he had used magic numbers which he confirmed made his soluton not re-usable. He also wrote it in jQuery which may be nice considering that a lot of people use jQuery as it works on legacy browsers.

Exploring SVG for absolute beginners

SVG is one of the cool stuff of these HTML5 days and if you aren’t already fiddling with them already, either by using ready SVG icons or writing your own SVG, then you are missing out on a lot.

Articles on X-Team Articles on Infosec Institute