I wrote about the road to becoming a contractor last week where I discussed the decision making process and some of the day to day differences from being a permanent employee. One thing I failed to discuss was the logistics involved with moving around and how I manage my development environment. In this post I want to share my setup and how I have tuned this so that I am able to get installed quickly and be productive on the different machines I have to work on.

Becoming a contractor can be a daunting decision to make, in any profession. The loss of certain perceived benefits from being a permanent employee such as holiday pay and sick leave can appear to be an inconceivable risk to some people. I want to use this post to share some insight into how I’ve dealt with certain aspects of being a contractor and hopefully give some advice to those of you also considering the move into contracting.

I’ve been working with the Notification API this week and wanted to write a quick post to demonstrate how to ask the user for permission to send them notifications of events that are happening in your web application. I was mostly inspired to do this after using the Wunderlist web application which is a really nice piece of engineering and super useful too.

I wrote briefly about iterators and generators last week and during my research into those I touched briefly on promises. I’ve since had time to properly investigate the native promise implementation and… yeah, it looks promising, groans.

So I finally got around to reading up on some of the new stuff in ES6 or whatever it’s called this week, JavaScript 2015. There’s some pretty cool stuff being added to the language and I think that the future for us JavaScript developers looks on the whole, pretty bright. There was a particular combination of new features—I might add that these are available in both Chrome and Firefox’s mainstream builds today—that sparked my interest and that is Symbols, Iterators and Generators. On top of these we also have some nice new language features such as the for...of loop which is much like the for...in but instead iterates over the values of an object that conforms to the iterator protocol.

Adaptor (AKA jQuery Box Slider) has been about for a couple of years now and in it’s infancy was somewhat revolutionary utilising new browser capabilities. Since then browser implementations had moved on and the plugin had gathered dust but despite that the project had seen a steady growth of stars and forks on Github with most of the issues relating to the fact that it was not responsive. I’ve recently been able to seize the opportunity to spend some time and make the existing slide effects responsive and in the process have made some performance improvements to both the core and individual effect plugins.

It’s been over a year since I touched my blog and, even worse, since I did anything meaningful in the open source space. The last year has been and continues to be extremely hectic for me both inside and outside of work but I’m now hoping that the end of this year and the start of next year will bring some time for me to concentrate more on what I love doing, Code.