Lab Zero has been building server-side applications for products of all shapes and sizes using languages like Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and Java since 2008. We’re always looking for the best tools available and that has generally been satisfied in the Ruby and JavaScript ecosystems. We still love Ruby and JavaScript, and will continue writing both, but I’ve been feeling the itch to adopt an additional language and framework to the LZ toolbelt.
The Lab Zero Design Team had the opportunity to attend Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2016 conference in San Francisco. The conference brought designers together from all over the world to share diverse perspectives. We met folks from Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Japan in addition to folks from right here in our hometown.
We are back from UX Week 2016 and we really enjoyed the conference. Our hosts Adaptive Path offered an app for attendees, and we thought we’d share some impressions from using it at this year's conference. Most of our team in attendance use iOS devices, but the experience seems similar with the Android and Web interfaces.
Lab Zero’s design team is embarking this week to an experience designer’s dream: UX Week San Francisco! UX professionals from all over the world are giving talks and workshops about the latest ideas and research in our field. As a product design and development shop, we’re always eager to learn new ways to think about design and how to better serve our clients. We’re looking forward to exciting experiences ahead.
Development of new front-end frameworks continues to move forward at blazing speeds — so fast, at times, that it’s hard for testing frameworks to keep up. In the case of React app development, our go-to solution is a collection of small tools that work together to provide us with a bespoke unit-testing workflow: Mocha, Chai, Sinon, Enzyme, Proxyquire, and Istanbul.
A fascinating and powerful thing I learned years ago: humans aren’t very good at hearing the words “you should.” Those words send a loaded message to the recipient: “I know better than you do, and since you aren’t doing what I think you should, I think you’re ignorant.” We take it as an attack and react defensively, returning the volley with our assertion that we know the situation better than anyone, and give a litany of reasons why the suggestion won’t work. We walk away from the interaction feeling bruised, lessened, unsupported.
If user stories are a part of your process, you likely see them as an essential tool to help your team focus on the task at hand. Over the years, we have found that the activities that surround story writing are as important as the story itself.
Designers and developers have always labored to translate polished mockups into code. Designers manually annotate mockups and create detailed style guidelines, or learn to code CSS & HTML comps. Developers might need to spend time inspecting design source files. Not only is this time consuming, it’s also easy for subtle details to be mistranslated. Compounding the problem, teams often work on products that are continually iterated upon. Producing and maintaining design guidelines and translating designs takes valuable time away from focusing on customer development, design thinking and implementing new features.
Working at Lab Zero comes with many perks: adjustable standing desks with electric motors, tons of free food and drink, flexible schedules—and of course our annual trek to O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (#oscon). Attending this great conference allows our various project teams to gain insights from the open source community. It also serves as a good barometer of how our industry peers are utilizing many of the tools and technical approaches we use for our clients.
I teach a class on front-end web development basics at our local hackerspace, Noisebridge. It's a bit of a beginner-level class, and it'd be overwhelming to create a React and Redux app from the ground up, so I took our Lunch app and walked my students through the fundamentals.