Back Alley Coder: Recent Episodes
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Defining identity is a notoriously difficult endeavor. Identity, in the technology industry, is the name of a business vertical that developers and software vendors use to describe a class of products and services they employ for managing users, authentication, and access control. But the average person doesn’t define identity in this way. They’re more likely […]
The post Identity Is the Dark Matter & Energy of Our World appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
The following is an attempt to stomp out the seemingly endless FUD that circulates about Web Components, most of which is purely manufactured by attacking tangential, opinionated choices of frameworks that happen to use Web Components in a way that differs from the opinions of other frameworks. Level Setting Don’t let me catch you claiming […]
The post Demythstifying Web Components appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
Blockchain Scalability Developers of apps and services, blockchain-based or not, must always consider efficiency and scalability in determining how to best serve the needs of their users. This is especially true when you add new or emerging technologies to the equation. In the realm of blockchain-based apps and services, scalability considerations are magnified by the […]
The post Scaling Decentralized Apps & Services via Blockchain-based Identity Indirection appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
I had the opportunity to both co-chair and present at the W3C’s blockchain workshop at MIT in Boston this week. More than 100 of the best and brightest from the standards and blockchain worlds met to discuss potential Web standards opportunities for blockchain tech. I have been working toward the establishment of a large-scale, user-sovereign, […]
The post Recapping the W3C Blockchain Standardization Workshop @ MIT appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
“The Hammer’s Coming Down” In my work with open source blockchains, distributed hash tables, and peer-to-peer systems in the area of identity, I have run across people making this statement from time to time, often in an effort to minimize open source, decentralized, distributed systems vs their centralized or proprietary counterparts: “The data on these […]
The post The Nickelback Persistence Conjecture appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
SPA woes For some time now I have wanted the ability to route paths for a gh-pages site to its index.html for handling as a single-page app. This ability is table stakes for single-page apps because you need all requests to be routed to one HTML file, unless you want to copy the same file […]
The post S(GH)PA: The Single-Page App Hack for GitHub Pages appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
Imagine Jane wakes up to the sound of her alarm clock, it’s 6:13 AM. “Oh great, what am I in for today,” she thinks. Jane’s alarm clock is normally set for 6:30 AM, but her identity agent detected a traffic accident that is projected to add 17 minutes to her commute. Jane’s identity agent, acting […]
The post The Web Beyond: How blockchain identity will transform our world appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
The battle ground of app-to-app interaction history is littered with abandoned ideas, half-solutions, and unimplemented APIs. The current, consumer/provider interaction paradigm for apps and services is a mess of one-off, provider-defined systems that each use their own transaction mechanisms and custom data structures. This makes it hard to do simple things across N providers, like […]
The post A Renewed Call for App-to-App Interaction APIs appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
Everybody’s looking for Element Queries What are Element Queries? At a high level, I’d describe them as pure, unfiltered, rocket fuel for hyper-responsive layouts and components. More technically, they are Media Queries scoped to individual elements. Element Queries would allow you to attach Media Query break-points based on the dimensions and characteristics of an element […]
The post Element Queries, From the Feet Up appeared first on Back Alley Coder.
UPDATE: This post has seen a significant change from the first version of the code. It now relies on a much simpler method: a hidden object element that relays its resize event to your listeners. DOM Elements! Y U No Resize Event? During your coding adventures, you may have run into occasions where you wanted […]
The post Cross-Browser, Event-based, Element Resize Detection appeared first on Back Alley Coder.