Ben Farrell – Page 3 – creating digital hugs

2015 Intentions

user · March 24, 2015

This past year and a half have been a little busy for me. I’ve moved to the Bay Area, moved again to Oakland, started a new job, and had a steady stream of speaking gigs at conferences. It’s now March 2015 and my blogging has dropped off quite a bit. Back when I was doing …

Atomic Desktop Power

user · October 20, 2014

Hey everyone! I just got back from HTML5DevConf in San Francisco where I gave my talk “Atomic Desktop Power with Node.js”. I had also given the same talk on the east coast last month at NCDevCon. As promised, I want to share some links with you. Like I said in the talk, I made my …

Working with Input Text Bound to a Model in Polymer….made me angry

user · July 28, 2014

Gah! Ben smash. I wanted to do the simplest thing in Polymer, only to find it was RAGE INDUCING! But now, at least I have a good understanding of how filters work – yay! OK so here’s my problem. Given a JSON model… { “id”: “somekindofstring”, “maxAge”: 289, “maxItems”: 21, “maxDuration”: 600, } … I’d …

Managing your Polymer Project with Git, Bower, and Yeoman

user · July 22, 2014

I’ve been working more and more with Polymer lately and trying to establish some workflows that make sense. For those that aren’t familiar with Polymer, it’s essentially a set of polyfills that enable you to work with those fancy things called Web Components even though browsers don’t generally support them yet. All the Javascript frameworks/tools/libraries …

A Polymer + Gulp + Atom-Shell Workflow

user · July 5, 2014

Polymer has been on my mind for a while. I’ve been quite happy plugging away with AngularJS, however a co-worker of mine mentioned to me that AngularJS just wasn’t present at Google I/O with some uncomfortable looks from Polymer presenters when asked about Angular. Given the recent social media blitz of Polymer and Material from …

Creative Node.js : The Presentation

user · May 12, 2014

In a couple days, I’ll be giving the first stop on my “Creative Node.js” presentation tour! I’m speaking at cfObjective in Minneapolis on Wednesday May 14th. After that I’ll be speaking at HTML5DevConf in San Francisco on Thursday May 22nd. I’m giving a talk about how folks can and should use Node.js for visual and …

Another jerk writes about Google Glass

user · April 30, 2014

The last thing the internet needs is another jerk writing about Google Glass – yet here we are. I’ve been pining to try Glass for awhile. I was, of course, jealous when my friend Adrian got Glass. Yet I wasn’t willing to shell out the $1500 on a product that was still baking AND travel from …

Hackfit San Francisco

user · March 25, 2014

Yup, I’m pretty exhausted now because this weekend I attended Hackfit San Francisco. What is it? Well – it’s a hackathon that focuses on fitness and health tech, but ALSO promises group exercise, reasonable bedtimes, and healthy meals. I’d never been to a proper hackathon before, mostly because in my early career as a developer …

The 3D Sensing Apocalypse & My Node.js plugin

user · February 28, 2014

Dire straits are ahead for 3D sensing. I commented about it back in November – that I hoped Apple wouldn’t kill open source 3D sensing library OpenNI from Primesense after the buyout. If you visit http://www.openni.org you’ll notice that the entire website will shut down on April 23rd. Also unfortunate is that you’ll no longer be …

Windows for Front End Web Development

user · January 15, 2014

I’ve been using Ubuntu as my development environment for around 2 years now. Getting to know Linux has been surprisingly enjoyable – I had tried both Mint and Ubuntu, both of which were stellar OS’s. I didn’t switch from Windows back then because I expected a better OS, really. I did it because the web …