Rob Dodson

In my last post, My Second Brain Never Worked.

I always wanted a second brain.

In 1994, Pizza Hut launched PizzaNet, one of the first—and possibly best named—online ordering platforms.

I really love the personal finance app Monarch.

When I left Google back in October of 2021, I did so because I wanted to find a job working on climate change.

On September 9th 2020, I woke up to find that the sky outside of my window looked like this: Smoke from nearby wildfires was trapped over the Bay Area, making the region look like the surface of Mars.

In October 2021, I left my job at Google to see if I could find a role in climate tech.

I’m always fascinated by learning the productivity tools that people use.

A while back I was working with a fellow Googler to try and improve the accessibility for one of our apps.

Over the weekend I updated my ancient Ghost blog to version 2.0.

Oliver on twitter asked: Is there a list somewhere of which HTML elements can and can’t have a shadow DOM?

When I first started to learn about accessibility I wanted to write automated tests to ensure that assistive technology devices, like screen readers, were interpreting my pages correctly.

Goodbye, 2017 Politics The year opened with a lot of protests and rallies.

When users of assistive technology, like a screen reader, navigate a web page, it’s vitally important that the semantic meaning of the various controls is communicated.

Introduction Over the last year I’ve had a number of discussions with mid to large sized companies who are interested in creating common UI libraries that all of their teams can share.

This is a post I should have written a loooong time ago… tl;dr: jQuery plugins don’t work inside of Shadow DOM because typically they try to query for something starting at the document level and the shadow root blocks this.

After reading an article titled The broken promise of Web Components and typing out the world’s longest comment response I figured it’d be better if I try to distill my thoughts into a blog post.

Safari Tech Preview 17 now has Custom Elements “enabled everywhere”, meaning it won’t be long before they’re shipping in a stable version.

As the sites we build increasingly become more app-like it’s important that the platform keep up and give component authors the tools they need to build rich accessible experiences.

I’ve set out to learn some of the Android framework this quarter, which means setting up Java and the lastest version of Android Studio.

I was building custom elements with Polymer the other day, and I thought it would be cool to include Font Awesome for some sweet icon goodness.

Web Components have come a long way in the past few months and one of the technologies that I’m most interested in is HTML Imports (or “imports”, for short).

I ran into a CSS gotcha today and it brought up an interesting (and important) question: What’s the difference between nth-child and nth-of-type?

Over the past few weeks I put together this talk for my team at GE to help get everyone on the same page with AMD modules.

Our first template There’s a great HTML5Rocks article on the subject of the template tag and I’m going to steal some of their examples.

Update: Thanks to @waynemoir for updating the example source to work with Grunt ~0.4.

I’ve been working with RequireJS a lot lately and found it really improves the way I manage my code.

Table of Contents Factories encapsulate and separate object creation from the rest of your code.

Yesterday’s post drew a lot of traffic from Reddit and with it came some really good feedback.

Table of Contents Update: Part 2 has been posted!

Table of Contents Observer is one of the most popular design patterns and chances are you’re probably already using it.

Table of Contents If you’re coming from Ruby or Java you probably think of an Iterator as an object which gives you a consistent interface for traversing a collection of some kind.

Table of Contents Ah yes the Singleton, a pattern whose name lives in infamy.

Table of Contents The Strategy pattern is one of my personal favorites and you’ve probably seen or used it in some fashion without even knowing it.

Creational Abstract Factory Builder Factory Method Object Pool Prototype Singleton Structural Adapter Bridge Composite Decorator Facade Flyweight Private Class Data Proxy Behavioral Chain of Responsibility Command Interpreter Iterator Mediator Memento Null

Note to readers: Since writing this post I’ve gone back and hidden a bunch of the posts that I created during this chain because they were bitrotting.

Yesterday I covered some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the past few months of using Sublime.

I’ve been using Sublime Text 2 for probably two months now and in that time I’ve discovered tons of useful tricks.

Alright, contuing from yesterday we want to take our little Node module and make it available to the world as a really awesome command line tool.

First write some code Make a new directory called compliment and create two files inside of it: comliment.js and package.json.

So yesterday we saw how to setup and run ruby scripts as executables from the command line.

Yesterday I tried to do a post on creating your first Ruby Gem as a command line tool.

In an effort to further my understanding of CSS best practices I’ve ended up with two sort of looming frameworks: OOCSS and SMACSS.

CSS is, for me, one of the most challenging and nerve wracking aspects of my job.

Today’s the day we wrap up our countdown timer and deploy it to Heroku.

Continuing from yesterday’s post we started out with a rather crude timer and today I want to upgrade it to a full fledged model, Stopwatch, which dispatches events for the view to hook on to.

Yesterday I put together a very simple Node/Socket.io application and showed how to deploy it to Heroku.

Last week I did a post on how to load an Underscore template using jQuery’s Deferred method.

Update: If you’re starting a fresh project with Express it’s much easier to just run express --ejs.

Today’s post is meant to scratch an itch I had the other day regarding templates.