This was such a interesting video that I had to share it on the blog :)

Note: the video was removed from vimeo, so I’ve relinked it from YouTube

dotNetConf, the free, virtual conference of all cool things .NET started just two hours ago! Come and join, there’s a bunch of smart developers hanging out on Jabbr following the event.

Btw, you can access all sessions from the conference on YouTube. They are being added as they are recorded. Isn’t that awesome.

The “barbarian meets” series are a collection of articles that intend to introduce and explain useful libraries, frameworks, tools and technologies in simple and straightforward terms. These new series will focus on Knockout.js, the popular JavaScript MVVM library

Have you ever done any XAML development? Have you ever wondered or considered how cool it would be to use XAML-style data bindings and MVVM on the web? How awesome to get that level of rich user experience and separation of concerns? Well, that is what Knockout.js is all about.

And now that I have painted a clear picture in your mind .NET developer, and alienated you non .NET developer for using a completely useless simile I will go with the more accurate, yet less sensational introduction:

Knockout.js is an outstanding JavaScript library that lets you create super rich user experiences in the web by providing an easy and seamless way to sync your HTML views with your underlying data. Its core strengths: declarative two-way data bindings and a full-blown templating engine.

I understand… words are just words… you want to see some code! Behold!!!

Barbaric Tip of the Week is a weekly series whose main purpose is to share tiny bits of knowledge that I find specially useful and interesting.

This week’s Barbaric Tip comes from Greg Smith and Isaac Durazo who made an awesome guide to CSS layout called Learn CSS Layout.

Very interesting, useful, illustrative and updated. Don’t miss it :).

Welcome stranger, sit down by the fire and let us hear the epic deeds, the tales of joy, of woe and of note that occurred these past seven days.

These past two weeks I have been doing 100% front-end web development, loads of JavaScript, Knockout, HTML and CSS both at work and at home. And so, I have been reading a bunch of books and articles on the matter. Below you can see the best of them:

Epic Articles

CSS

• Don’t use ID selectors in CSS
• Simplifying CSS selectors
• Writing efficient CSS
• Performance impact of CSS selectors
• CSS: Specificity Wars (lol)
• What makes for a semantic class name?

UX

• Improving UX through front-end performance

HTML5 Mobile Development

• Touralot: an iOS app built with PhoneGap, Knockout and Azure Mobile Services

JavaScript

• Knockout Asynchronous Module Definition(AMD) with require.js
• Getting into Ember.js
• Using JSHint inside Visual Studio
• Organize your code with require.js

I am going through one of those hibernation periods in which, not matter what I do, I cannot wake up at 5 am as usual and thus, my side-project development hurts xD. Anyhow, I have managed to start a new Knockout project called iPomodoro, and although it is very, very green still, it is meant to become some sort of Pomodoro technique web-based application. More on that soon :)

Cheers!