think pink

a weblog by  Elliott Kember

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of speaking at WDC 2011. WDC is a great little conference in Bristol, and I have had the pleasure of speaking a few times now. One of the things I advised in my eclectic, meandering talk was to ask people what frameworks they used, and find out why they chose them. A few people have since asked me to elaborate on how I ended up using Rails, so I thought I’d write up a few thoughts on the fram... read more

@dizzyup and I are very pleased to be able to announce our new co-operative: Riot. It’s been a long time coming, mostly because we’re equal parts lazy and busy, but we’ve finally put the site live. Hector’s the designer, and I’m the developer – and together we’ll be building lots of cool stuff in the months to come. Stay tuned! http://cl.ly/3wSW/Screen_shot_2011-01-09_at_18.43.12... read more

I was bored the other night, so Dan W and Julian and I had a bit of a hack-night session. Dan was working on Doppmaxion, which looks awesome, and Julian and I took the opportunity to do a little bit of Ruby hacking. What did we get up to, you ask? Well, if you’re in a decent browser such as Safari or Chrome, and using a fairly powerful compu... read more

This article was originally posted on the Carsonified blog on the 6th of August, 2008, by me. However, it’s been two years and this is still a problem. A lot of geeks and developers out there are using Mozilla Firefox. It’s a fantastic browser, and I highly recommend it. Firefox has been a huge factor in the progress of web development. Where would we be without the Web Developer Toolbar and Fire... read more

Hector and I have been busy – check out what we made the other day: it’s a game of Hot Potato! It’s a quick and dirty, one-day fun app. http://uploads.elliottkember.com... read more

Here’s some code I posted on Forrst a while back. There’s an error with this code. Where it says $(this).html() I meant to write $(this).html(html)
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As far as I can tell, one of the Apple standpoints is minimizing configuration. Having a single way of doing things is baked-in – you can only resize from one corner, you can only close a window from the red X button, and you can’t customize your system and make it totally different from all the others. I love this simplicity. Removing the ability to mess with things forces me to get on with the things I should be doing. It takes a lot more work to perfect, but th... read more

I love the new functionality in the WebKit Nightly builds. The nightlies are a great platform – very fast, usually pretty reliable, and super-CSS3-compatible. However, recently the typeface used in the nightly web inspector has changed from Lucida Grande to Menlo. I understand the change, and that Menlo is a monospace font – but I just can’t help th... read more

There’s been a lot of hate for the App store approval process over the past… well, ever since the App Store surfaced. It seems like anybody who has ever touched the SDK has a bad word to say about the draconian Apple iron curtain. The iPad’s recent release has incited similar levels vitriol – it’s closed, Apple is taking over the world, blah blah. Apple seems to be blocking applications that duplicate native iPhone apps,... read more

I’ve recently been playing around with monetizing one of my applications: Filetweet. It’s a fairly simple application, designed to allow you to send files over Twitter. You may have seen it; some of you may have even used it. It’s the first application I’ve built that I’ve tried to charge for – as an experiment. Using the excellent Spreedly service, and the not-quite-so-excellent PayPal merchant gateway service, it’s really easy to st... read more

People sometimes ask me “How can I get good at programming?” “How can I get really good at Javascript?” The sad thing is, I don’t bother answering these questions any more. What inevitably happens is, I give people a list of things to read and try out, then come back 6 months later to find them in exactly the same spot. So what’s going wrong here? I think they’re after the wrong thing. The problem here is that they know what they want... read more

I’ve been at Buildconf for the last two days. It was one of the best conferences I’ve been to. So instead of writing a whole bunch of tweets, which would be annoying, I’ve decided to write a blog post with a list. To make it interesting, count up the number of points you can identify with and leave your score in the comments. Finding out how to open bananas... read more

As you all may have noticed, I’ve been playing around with some cool live-action stuff. At FOWA London, I built a live Twitter feed. The original idea was to build an app to complement HelloApp, a .NET site built by Carsonified for the read more

Writing code for a living can be a bit depressing at times. It has a lot to do with the fact that it’s a sedentary, and often lonely occupation – especially if you work by yourself, for yourself. Lonely hours at a computer screen does wonders for the soul. However, I think it’s important to remember something: Programming is fucking awesome. There are a lot of reasons why this is a popular belief. You’re in charge of a system, and you h... read more

In December last year, I built my own personal site to advertise my new-found employability – www.elliottkember.com. Then, looking at my twitter background, I figured it’d be cool to have a similar image on my own site – a bit of continuity. Then, I was talking to Greg Annandale when a thought occurred to me: read more

I’d appreciate it if you read this entire article before commenting. So there I was, in a RyanAir Boeing 737-800 coming back from FOWA Dublin. Having just spent three days partying it up I was a little under the weather. It was late, it was raining, and I wanted to sit back bolt upright, read my Jeremy Clarkson book and drink my €5 Coke. During take-off, the crew turn off all the lights in t... read more

The other day I was in the local coffee shop dealing to my addiction. I couldn’t help but notice that the guys behind the counter were speaking in a foreign language. We’ve all heard this language: “Double cap out, no foam”, “Chai mocha skinny half with space”, “Moon unit alpha, tennis elbow”. It sounds like some kind of indecipherable language – the secret code of the Illumilatté, if you will. I realise, of course, that these contractions are inevitable when you’re performin... read more