Design Systems Playground
October 14, 2019
Play with typography and colors to generate a design system theme you can use in your projects.
Making a Gatsby Events List Starter
March 16, 2019
I recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Gatsby. Next up, I’m going to do the same for chicagotechevents.com As a first step, I made a…
Notes from AWS Summit
July 27, 2017
I attended the AWS Summit in Chicago this week. Like many other tech companies, we at Gesture use various AWS products so it was a nice…
Speaking at Front End Camp Chicago and Introducing TweenDeck
June 04, 2017
Over the weekend, I gave a talk titled “Rethinking CSS: Go Functional for Scaling, Performance & Simplicity” at Front End Camp Chicago. The…
The Writing Bug
January 12, 2017
Got bit by the writing bug. First, after over a year of working with Functional CSS and loving it, when I read this article, I felt…
The Atomic/Functional CSS Movement
June 17, 2016
When I published Expressive CSS a few months ago, I knew it would be controversial, and it was (as evidenced in the comments on my Content…
I Wrote Our Developer Job Description
May 18, 2016
We’re hiring a new developer, and my boss asked me to “gussy up” the job description. I love working with great people, so I’m happy help…
Notes from UX Camp Chicago
May 01, 2016
It was a rainy day in Chicago yesterday, so it was a perfect time to spend inside at Columbia College for UX Camp Chicago. It was yet…
Content Display Patterns with Expressive CSS
March 01, 2016
See my writeup at /johnpolacek.com/content-display-patterns/
Keep gh-pages and master in sync with one line of code
January 29, 2016
If you publish projects to Github, then you probably are using a gh-pages branch to create a nice home for your project with a demo and some…
Expressive CSS and Using NPM as a Build Tool
December 05, 2015
Seems like every front end web dev eventually publishes a manifesto about their approach to CSS. So here is mine: Expressive CSS (Shout out…
Fun With Greensock Animation
November 25, 2015
I’ve started some work on a new fun little (secret for now) side project with the GreenSock Animation Platform. As part of that, I had some…
Simple Responsive Grid
July 05, 2015
Simple Grid is the responsive grid system I am using on all of my websites these days. View it on Github. 3 years ago I published Extra…
Guide to the Chicago Tech and Startup Scene
June 10, 2015
For the past 2 years, I have been curating a list of Chicago web, tech and startup events at chicagotechevents.com. It has been great to see…
Announcing Gesture
May 12, 2015
Over the last month, I’ve been working on a secret project, to help rebrand my company and launch our new website. I’m thrilled to say that…
Funny on Github
April 12, 2015
Github projects aren’t just frameworks, libs and plugins. There is some funny in there too. Here are some github projects that will make you…
Building a Game With a 6-Year-Old
November 29, 2014
I just open sourced a game I’ve been working on with my 6-year-old son Jack over Thanksgiving weekend. Click Here to Play Want to work with…
Share Your Git Aliases Day
October 19, 2014
Git aliases have been around for a long time, but in case you don’t know about them, they allow you to create shortcuts for just about any…
A Year of Startup Life
August 20, 2014
It has now been a full year since I left the agency and client services world to join a startup. Going from a large multinational company…
How to Get Open Source Project Ideas and Execute Them
April 11, 2014
A common question people ask me is how I come up with open source project ideas. It is a pretty simple process: 1. Have A Problem If you are…
One Year of Open Source Traffic
February 02, 2014
I’ve put Google Analytics on some of my Github project pages, but hardly ever look at it. Well, today I decided to take a look at a year’s…
AWS Notes: Mastering NoSQL – Advanced Amazon DynamoDB Design Patterns for Ultra-High Performance Apps
November 15, 2013
DynamoDB Engineer David Yanacek started things out by giving an overview of the types of tables and queries that exist in a typical social…
AWS Notes: Writing JavaScript Applications with the AWS SDK
November 15, 2013
AWS Developer Loren Segal introduced the AWS SDK for Node.js It is open source, apache-licensed and on Github. They have full service…
AWS Notes: 2nd Annual Startup Launches
November 15, 2013
I always love hearing startup pitches and launches. Koality First was Koality, a build deployment service built, of course, on top of AWS…
AWS Notes: Scaling a Mobile Web App to 100 Million Clients and Beyond
November 14, 2013
For me, this was the best session of the conference so far. Joey Parsons, Head of Operations at Flipboard gave a talk about how they grew…
AWS Notes: Amazon Workspaces
November 14, 2013
This session was about the new Workspaces product that Amazon launched at the first day AWS re:Invent keynote. First he covered what…
AWS Notes: Zero to Sixty with AWS Elastic Beanstalk
November 14, 2013
I ran a little late to this one, which is unfortunate because it was a really good one. I got there as Ann Wallace, Solutions Architect at…
AWS re:Invent: Keynote Day Two
November 14, 2013
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is quite a character. He talked about how there are so many products and announcements, it can be confusing. “Rapid…
AWS Notes – AWS Storage and Database Architecture Best Practices
November 14, 2013
AWS Enterprise Solutions Architect Siva Raghupathy started by stating that 2.7 zettabytes (ZB) of data exists in the digital universe today…
AWS Notes – Scalable Media Processing
November 14, 2013
I have some background in working with delivering media via the web at my previous job, for example when I created BigVideo.js. “For any…
AWS Notes – Building Cloud-Backed Mobile Apps
November 13, 2013
This session was about streamlining sign-in with social login, storing user data and more. AWS Software Engineer Glenn Dierkes spoke about…
AWS Notes – Dynamic Content Acceleration: Lightning Fast Web Apps
November 13, 2013
Now more than ever, having performant applications is essential for users. Every year, Forrester does a study showing how much response time…
AWS re:Invent: The Keynote
November 13, 2013
AWS re:Invent is a learning conference. They host a diverse spectrum of companies are startups, mid-size companies and large enterprise. AWS…
Open Source For The Wins
November 11, 2013
I was browsing around some web design award sites today. So much inspiring stuff out there to be found. What do all these beautiful and…
Social Enterprise At Technori
November 03, 2013
Last week I was finally able to attend a Technori Pitch. This month’s event featured early stage companies focused on having a positive…
The Bootstrap Trap
August 26, 2013
The promise of Bootstrap is so appealing. A quick, easy way to get a web project up and running that just works, and works well. It is a…
AuctionsByCellular
August 13, 2013
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been hired by AuctionsByCellular (ABC) as Lead Web Developer. ABC is an exciting new company that uses…
Using Trello For Idea Management
July 10, 2013
Trello is a fantastic web app from Fog Creek Software for organizing just about everything. I have written before about how I use it to…
Open Source Your Code For Fame and Fortune
June 29, 2013
My slides from my Techweek Chicago presentation are going to be published live (wifi permitting) during the talk. Once that happens, you can…
Techweek LAUNCH
June 29, 2013
J.B. Pritzker started talking about all the great stuff happening in the City of Chicago. He was especially excited about innovations…
Techweek Day 2: Mobile Prototyping
June 29, 2013
This was another Techweek Lab Coat Series Session that covered various new prototyping tools. There is a lot of activity in this are, with…
Techweek Day 2: Entertainment for the Masses
June 28, 2013
This was the best session of the conference so far. Emerson Spartz says that understanding how to make things go viral is like having a…
Techweek Day 2 – Labcoat Series: SEO
June 28, 2013
SEO takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Google takes time to see the changes in your site. For smaller sites, it may take 30 days for…
The Sharing Economy: P2P Everything
June 28, 2013
Robin Chase, Founder & CEO, Buzzcar, Zipcar and GoLoco. People only ‘consume’ cars for an hour or two at a time. The idea is to ‘right-size…
Techweek Day 2: How to Turn Tweets Into $$$
June 28, 2013
Some key points from the panelists (Natalia Oberti Noguera, Rick Murray, Justyn Howard and Brad Burke People don’t relate to companies…
Techweek Day 2: When Humor is a Serious Business
June 28, 2013
This was an interview session with Dick Glover, President & CEO, Funny or Die, which launched 6 years ago. User generated content was the…
Techweek Day 2: How to Build Great Products
June 28, 2013
The thesis of ‘How to Build Great Products: Design and Roadmapping’ by Nicolette Moreno, Founder & Chief Product Officer of Open English…
Techweek 2013 – Day 1
June 28, 2013
Every year, Techweek Chicago grows. This year there are over 8000 attendees and actually thousands of companies, ranging from fledgling…
Techweek Chicago 2013
June 25, 2013
Techweek Chicago was a great experience for me last year. For those who don’t know, it has become Chicago’s premier tech conference, where…
Chicago Tech Events
June 19, 2013
Throughout the past year, I have been keeping a running list of cool local Chicago tech events and sharing it with friends and the people at…
Google I/O Roundup
May 18, 2013
Every year Google makes its big announcements at its Google I/O event. This year, the Chicago HTML5 User Group hosted a watch party…
When Inpiration Strikes
April 29, 2013
The dev ops guy on our team comes up with some creative and hilarious passwords for our web servers. Every time he sends me a new ssh…
Awesome Responsive Screenshots
April 16, 2013
Below is a quick, simple way to generate screenshots of Responsive websites like this (note: link is a big image, so it will take a while to…
Github: From Zero to Hero
April 13, 2013
Are you looking to get some projects up on Github? There are a few different approaches you can take. Here is mine. First, you need some…
How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer
March 24, 2013
It may seem counterintuitive to think being married with children could have a positive impact on your programming. Yet, that is exactly…
Google Refugees
March 16, 2013
Like many people, I was caught off guard when Google announced it was shuttering Reader. I use it every day, combined with iGoogle, another…
HTML5 Gotchas
February 12, 2013
I love new web technology. I love shiny new elements, api’s and css styles. I anxiously wait for them to reach enough browser support so…
Idea Realification
February 03, 2013
Idea Realification is about taking what’s in your head and making it happen. I am not claiming to be the world’s foremost expert on this…
Extra Strength Responsive Grids
January 29, 2013
Yesterday, I released Extra Strength Responsive Grids, the latest open source project from the devs at Draftfcb Chicago. It was a…
Awwward-winning Code
January 15, 2013
1/15/2013 Update – Another SuperScrollorama site, Zipper Galleria has won an Awwward The Awwwards are awards for design, creativity and…
Side Projects 2012
January 03, 2013
My list of in-my-spare-time projects that I’ve released last year: Scrollorama What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design Scrolldeck Scrollorama…
Developing In The Open
January 01, 2013
When you love what you do for a living, a great thing to do is never stop getting better. For a web developer, the best way to get better is…
Gisting
December 22, 2012
There are a lot of snippet organizers, but for me, the Github Gist is the best. I love making gists. Like this handy snippet for tracking…
SuperScrollorama Updates
December 18, 2012
There are some cool new updates to SuperScrollorama, courtesy of Austrian art director and developer Jan Paepke. From his email to me: I…
Responsive Experiments
December 11, 2012
It seems like everybody working on websites these days is experimenting with various responsive web design approaches. There’s the Filament…
Responsivator!
December 09, 2012
Responsive Web Design is pretty darn cool, but it is hard sometimes for people to wrap their heads around it. Whether you are trying to…
Apps I’m Thankful For
November 25, 2012
I’ve recently acquired both a new Macbook Pro and iPad. When you get new tech, it is an ideal time for tech spring cleaning, where you re…
Channel of Awesome
October 14, 2012
Like I imagine is the case for most large ad agencies, we have a number of large flat screen tv’s in various places around the office. They…
Help Prevent FOUC!
October 03, 2012
Do your web pages suffer from FOUC? Now, you can prevent FOUC with 2 easy steps! Step #1 – Add this to the head of your document: Step #…
How To Solve Tricky Problems
October 02, 2012
Think about problem before you go to bed Wake up and think about problem again. Answer will magically appear in brain.
Scrollorama Showcase
September 03, 2012
Here’s a nice collection of sites using my Scrollorama or Superscrollorama plugins: Rule of Three* Well Done Team GB!* Q music Titanic…
BigVideo.js
August 27, 2012
A few weeks ago, I started working on a website project at work. One of its features involved video that filled the page’s background, to…
Prototype Camp
August 25, 2012
Today I gave a talk at Prototype Camp Chicago entitled “The Never Ending Quest To Build Cool Stuff’. My session started right after Jared…
Front End Interview Questions
August 11, 2012
A few months ago, Darcy Clarke posted a collection of Front End Developer Interview Questions to Github. Another dev at work shared them…
Techweek Day 5
June 26, 2012
Keynote: Matt Maloney, CEO of GrubHub The main subject of Matt’s talk was the fundamentals of growing a big company, based on what he’s…
Techweek Day 4
June 26, 2012
The big event of day 4 of Techweek is Startup City and they’ve put together a great lineup of speakers big on the startup scene. Travis…
Techweek Day 3
June 25, 2012
Digital Media Reimagined Speaker Dave Marsey started off talking about the rapid growth of social, as user’s time spent on social is…
Techweek Day 2
June 23, 2012
Zero to Clojure Workshop Colin Jones introduced me to a new (to me) way of learning a new coding language: Koans. After a quick overview of…
Techweek Day 1
June 23, 2012
Chicago’s Techweek Conference kicked off with a speech from Mayor Rahm Emanual. He spoke at length about all the initiatives that are being…
10 Super Cool Websites
April 26, 2012
Today at work I was asked to share a list of ‘10 Super Cool Websites’ and here’s what I picked in no particular order. greygoose.com www…
Rules To Write By
March 26, 2012
Some great rules to follow when writing, from this George Orwell essay: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you…
Stuff I Learned At SXSW, Part 3
March 13, 2012
Here are some random notes from the various sessions and discussions I’ve had during my time in Austin: Whenever you are looking at a device…
Stuff I Learned At SXSW, Part 2
March 11, 2012
I knew a lot of the stuff that was talked about in the Killer App Design session by Jonathon Morgan, but there was still plenty of valuable…
Stuff I Learned At SXSW, Part 1
March 11, 2012
One of the best sessions I’ve had so far was CSS For Grown-Ups by Andy Hume. Some of the highlights: CSS is ‘Constraint Programming…
Match The Letter Update
March 06, 2012
People have been asking about my Match The Letter game, so I thought I’d make a quick update post about it. I created Match the Letter in…
A Great Month
January 18, 2012
Wow, what a great few weeks I’ve had. Things started off when on New Year’s Day I posted my Scrollorama plugin to Hacker News and a couple…
Scrollorama
January 01, 2012
Over my holiday/new-baby-time-off break, I took some time to work on a couple new jQuery plugins that I’ve been thinking about. I’m a fan of…
My 2012 List of Goals
December 31, 2011
At the start of each year, I usually write out a list of things I plan on trying to accomplish professionally. For the last couple of years…
Responsive Thumbnail Gallery
November 17, 2011
I’ve just posted a new project to Github. This was a quick easy one. It’s a jQuery plugin for making a simple responsive image gallery that…
What I Love About Github
November 15, 2011
I just set up my Github homepage. I’ve been seeing all these people setting up cool project pages and wanted to get in on it. I’ve been…
Stuff I’m Into Now
October 26, 2011
Here are a few of the things that I have been into lately: Startup Podcasts. My current favorite, Tech Zing, as well as Mixergy and Startups…
Inspiration
September 30, 2011
There are so many great sources of web design and development inspiration out there. Below are some of my favorites. One Page Love My…
The Home Office
August 01, 2011
Finally finished our house renovations a couple weeks ago with a fresh coat of paint on the walls. Here’s a pic of my new home workspace:
10,000 Downloads
June 10, 2011
Match the Letter has just passed 10,000 downloads in total. A big thanks to everyone who downloaded it (and especially those who gave it a…
What I’m Working On
April 28, 2011
Been a real busy couple months working on a few different projects, most of which I can’t really talk about too much in detail. New App…
Match The Letter
March 08, 2011
My latest app, Match The Letter, is now available on the iTunes App Store and the >Android Marketplace. It is a free picture game that helps…
Video Gallery App Template
March 03, 2011
I’ve just posted the video gallery Corona SDK app template I’ve been working on up to Github. This template allows me to quickly create…
Code Library Now On Github
March 02, 2011
I’ve made updates to my code library (performance improvements mostly) and moved it from svn/google code to github. I’ve had enough of svn…
My Developer Plans for 2011
January 29, 2011
I may not get to everything on this list, but that’s ok. It is good to have a gameplan. I’ll likely even add some things as the year goes on…
Got Me Some Corona
January 25, 2011
I like Corona—both the beer and the SDK. This post is about the Corona SDK from AnscaMobile. I was reticent to drop the money on it, but now…
Developing My First Mobile App
January 18, 2011
In my spare time over the holidays, I worked on developing a game app for phones. The game is called Touch The Trend and it is now on sale…
Pour One More
January 15, 2011
A site I worked on went live a couple days ago. It’s a promotion site for the Milk ‘Pour One More’ campaign, giving away milk and…
Missile Pre-Order
January 07, 2011
The graphic novel for which I recently finished the art, Missile To The Moon, is now up for preview.
2010 and 2011
December 31, 2010
Looking back at my year in 2010, here are some things that stand out (professionally that is): Organized my various AS3 classes into library…
Master HTML Formatted Text in Flash
December 10, 2010
My first tutorial, Master HTML Formatted Text in Flash, has been published to ActiveTuts+, the best website there is for Flash tutorials…
A Productive Month
November 23, 2010
In the last month, I’ve… Started using LoaderMax for all my runtime loading in flash. Created my first cron job. Completed my first jQuery…
The Multiscreen Revolution
November 15, 2010
Over at my company’s corporate blog, I wrote a guest post about the ‘Multiscreen Revolution’ and my experiences at Adobe Max.
Adobe MAX Day 4
October 28, 2010
Stuff I learned on the final day of Adobe MAX: Dreamweaver CS5 has some cool new features and worth a look even for web devs who prefer text…
Adobe MAX Day 2
October 26, 2010
Stuff I learned on day 2: Keep up with the latest stats with data collected from Adobe’s SiteCatalyst at netaverages.adobe.com Adobe’s…
Adobe MAX Day 1
October 25, 2010
Today was my first day at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. The full conference officially starts tomorrow, but they had all day pre…