Golden Gate Relay Run – Progressive Web App

On May, We (a team from Google) are going to run from Napa Valley to Santa Cruz. It’s a relay 191 miles race or as some call it: “The longest party in CA”. There are teams of 12 members that will run 36 legs (3 legs per runner, 3-8 miles each) through 36 cities and… across the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight. All that is in support of Organs R Us.

Btw, if you want to help us, please donate.

In a quick effort from few Googlers, we came with a nice script that took a KML file and compile the information so we see all the legs of the race on one page.
The goal at the beginning was to print it so we could have it with us during the race. However, the final results is a little progressive web app (you can get it also at: https://bit.ly/ggrr1 ) that is working offline so you can save some trees and still see all the details for your next leg. If you do want to print this page, you can find this ‘printer friendly’ document useful.

Chrome And The Web App Revolution

Quick update from the world of Chrome. The new version in stable (chrome://version = 42 just like the answer to the universe) brings some interesting and powerful features that give web developers more options to create amazing experiences.

Chrome 42 (stable)

We are getting to a world where web developer could create web apps that act just like ‘native apps’ without any bridges (e.g. Cordova). The main enablers APIs are already in this version. Check out what you can do today with Service Worker and the options it’s giving you to cache, work offline and push notifications in the background. Here is an example I wrote that uses service worker to cache & offline. I think we are going to see some very interesting implications. There are many options for the “physical mobile web” and these powerful APIs.

Google Cloud Platform Update

Yesterday we had a very cool event at Google’s offices. There were many mobile and web developers that came to hear what is new with Google cloud technologies (among other thing). I’ve used this set of slides because I knew they will be useful to many more developers that miss the event. That is the reason, I’ve used ‘a lot’ of words on each slide.

The event was recorded and I will update this post with the video soon. Have a great 2014!

Chrome DevTools Tips

A (good) web developer use several tools in order to be productive and built amazing projects. I guess, you can find advocates for Vim or Emacs but after you pass the phase of writing the code, it’s time to check why it’s not doing what you wish to see. You can find on Opera Dragonfly and in FireFox land there is Firebug. But, as you might guess already, my favorite tool is Chrome DevTools on Canary.

What are DevTools?

The Chrome Developer Tools are a set web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome. The DevTools provide web developers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application.

(!) If you are a front-end developer you should use Google Chrome Canary. It is easy to install it side by side your regular Chrome and it will give you the latest and greatest features with frequent improvements. This post is not a replacement to the one ‘source of true‘ but more of an update on the new features we have today (OCT 2013) in Canary. Checkout the pictures below with the green arrows that show you some of the interesting feature you can use.

Git 101 – Useful Commands

A few commands I found myself using daily… Well, it might be a good idea to share it with others and see what can be done better. If you like to get out of the command line, I found Source Tree to be a powerful free application that give you many options to see the code, changes and flow. You might want to check it out. Another good option is the GitHub official client app. Ok, let’s jump into the list of git commands.