Recently, I was tasked with replacing a background video, created in Apple Motion, with an HTML5 canvas animation. Having never worked with canvas before, I was suprised at how fundamentally simple the canvas API was, though I can’t say it was ‘easy’ to work with neccessarily. Many hours of blood, sweat and tears later, I was able to produce something very close to the original video.

I just received a brand new Dell XPS in the mail, whoo! In order to have a slightly less painful experience developing native apps, I decided to dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu. Sounds pretty easy right? Wrong! There were a lot of hangups that nobody told me about, and I had to figure it all out by frantically googling while explosions were happening. This one is for all of you out there who want to avoid that headache.

Having grown up in the age of blinkies, I have a special fondness for animated elements. However, there is undoubtedly a certain level of restraint required when implementing animation today, too much and the page feels overwhelming very quickly. I’m particularly fond of this simple divider animation that I implemented for the Hexxel landing page.

Just recently, I had the opportunity to build my first Shopify theme, and I had to learn to get productive quickly. Here are a few of the things that those who are coming from other platforms might want to take note of.