Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag:

Online Editors For Web Developers

One of the most powerful aspects of the web is the ability to share your ideas and work with others quickly.

Over the years, I tried several options to share code and do demos. It’s true that you can always start your own server and serve your site, but in many cases, you want to focus on your demo and not do administrative work again and again. Here are some tools that I enjoyed using and I still find myself returning to check them from time to time. In most of them you got a nice ability to move (even) faster and to use GitHub for your code.

Browsers And Their Capabilities

The web is by far the biggest platform out there.

It’s everywhere or at least it’s on the way to be everywhere. From powerful cutting-edge devices down to devices that can do nothing more then send few bytes of information.

However, this pluralism of ways to consume this information bring a challenge to web developers. We need to understand what are the limitations and what are the capabilities of the browsers that will run our work of art.

Here are set of tools that will help you with that challenge.

Research

• chrome status – Web platform feature support and examples. It’s a great way to see what is coming up… and try to test it today in Chrome Canary. You can also check blink-dev forum. Blink is Chromium’s rendering engine so I found some very interesting discussions.
• status modern ie – Like Chrome Status but for Edge and Internet Explorer. It gives you the current status and the roadmap.
• ES6 compatibility – From server side to browsers. Learn what will run and where. After all, the common technology to ‘run’ things is javascript. OK – ECMAScript, fine.
• caniuse.com – Mobile and desktop browser capabilities.
• what web can do today – Stuff that your browser can do, with links to demos and information about browser support.
• mobile html5 – A table that contain features per mobile browser.
• If you testing a new browser for its CSS3 support this tool will do the work for you – css3test.com

Startups Use AMP and PWA

Startups must be agile and move fast. This is the main reason why I think they should use more both AMP and PWA as technologies that give them a lot of power.

As an entrepreneur, you wish to build this magic wheel of
users -> feedback -> product improvements.

The web is giving you the ability to reach users quickly and without any barriers. Moreover, you have today a lot of tools that let you listen to what your users are telling you (by their actions, not just words). This is very powerful when you wish to find a product market fit and later when you working hard to fine tune it.

Go North Innovation Event

The founder of Research In Motion talking about quantum computing

I’ve just finish to give me talk at the Go North event. The goal of this talk was to expose young entrepreneurs to the power of the web platform and how they could leverage progressive web apps in order to improve their businesses. It was very cool to meet with a lot of developers and entrepreneurs that are passion about the mobile web. One of the interesting questions I got was around AMP and PWA and how to bridge between them. Here is the detailed answer. The shorter version is that you want to start with AMP as a great first impression that you give your users (it’s all about speed!) and later stay engage/productive with PWA.
The two scenarios below tell this story in a nutshell.

Protect Your Website With HTTPS

TL;DR

1. Create (for free) an SSL certificate.
   One resource for that is letsencrypt.org
2. Install it on your website’s server: letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/ – You just quickly choose the client that will match your server environment or do everything in your browser.
3. Change all your website’s links from HTTP to HTTPS so that search engines are notified and users will get the HTTPS version.
4. Go have a drink.

Why?

You should always protect all of your websites with HTTPS, even if they don’t handle sensitive communications. HTTPS helps prevent intruders from tampering with the communications between your websites and your users’ browsers. It might be a malicious attacker or legitimate (but intrusive) companies, such as ISPs or hotels that inject ads into pages. Your users will think that your site is ugly or worst because they can’t tell who is doing what to the pages.
If you care about your users, always protect them and serve them with HTTPS. It will also prevents intruders from being able to passively listen in on the communications between your website and your users. Another benefit we gain from HTTPS is the ability to work with new powerful web platform features:

How To Kanban?

Kan-what?

That is the first thing you hear when someone is hearing about this for the first time. In my last two startups,  I used it and it works quite good for us. Like in Agile / Scrum and all the other methodologies, you need to try and take what works for you. The magic in Kanban is the ability to keep most of the ‘things that works’ and gain productivity. If you like to do daily stand-ups meeting – keep them. If you push new version to production every week – keep it and the list goes on. The power of Kanban is in the ability to improve the communication and to put everyone on the same page, or a board in this case.

The Kanban technique emerged in the late 1940s in Toyota. It was their effort to invent a new approach to manufacturing and engineering. Line-workers displayed colored kanbans (=cards) to notify their downstream co-workers that demand existed for parts and assembly work. The system’s highly visual nature allowed teams to communicate more easily on what work needed to be done and when. It also standardized cues and refined processes, which helped to reduce waste and maximize value.

How to use it in your startup?