Hello World!
Welcome to our new blog! Instructure is a technology company. And we have some pretty killer technologists who have opinions. This blog is an outlet for them to talk about stuff. Feel free to join in...
View ArticleCrafting accessible content
At Instructure, we’re moving more and more of our app to the client with technologies like Ember.js. While it and other JavaScript frameworks have made this transition easier, they’ve also introduced...
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Android Async HTTP Clients: Volley vs Retrofit
We recently released a new version of our mobile app for Android. Although it was a huge improvement from previous installments in terms of features, design, and usability, there was one nagging issue...
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Facebook React vs. Ember
Edited Jan 13, 2014 with minor changes which allow for testing timeouts in Ember. We engineers at Instructure love Ember. We also love to learn about other frameworks and know which tools are the best...
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Generating Accessible Colors in JavaScript
We recently released a major upgrade to Canvas’s calendar. Although the primary objective was adding an agenda view and other accessibility tools, we also took the opportunity to update its visual...
View ArticleFaster I18n Backend for Ruby Written in C
Every so often, we like to do a hack(fest|stravaganza|nado) here at Instructure. It’s an opportunity for engineers to spend several days building something cool to improve Canvas. For our inaugural...
View ArticleEmber Run Loop and TDD
Each month, nerds unite at the Instructure building to share their knowledge on Ember. This month we had two presentations by a couple of Instructure engineers. Here are the videos and accompanying...
View ArticleContinuous Integration
Parallelization, Selenium, AWS, and a CI server are common implementations for agile shops, and we are no exception. Since I’ve been here, maintenance hasn’t been a nightmare, nor has it been a dream....
View ArticleImageSweep : drawable management for Android
Software engineering is full of trade-offs: speed/memory usage, features/bugs, etc. The list goes on and on. The Android team here at Instructure found an interesting trade-off: developer-time versus...
View ArticleEmber Tech Talks - April 2014
Each month, geeks from near and far join up at Instructure to teach and learn about Ember.js. This month we had 3 amazing presentations which range from beginner to expert level training. Ember...
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Too big to test: combating test apathy in legacy code
Writing tests for large Rails apps with lots of dependencies and complicated modeling is, without question, a complete nightmare. We often spend more time wrestling with tests than we do writing code....
View ArticleApproaching Accessibility Testing
When I first started learning about accessibility, I had no idea what I was doing. I am a sighted person, and didn’t know if what I was doing was correct. I fed a URL to an online accessibility...
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Balanced Product Management
If you look at job descriptions and blogs about product-y things, there are lots of opinions about what makes a great product manager. They talk about owning strategy, roadmaps, markets, and plans....
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Breaking the Rules: Accessible Dialog Components
Turns out, role="dialog" isn’t your friend. Cursor Modes When you first start building accessible websites, you learn quickly that there are different cursor modes when using Windows screen readers,...
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Swift: Just Follow the Types
As Mac and iOS craftsmen we’ve been given a new tool. In some ways it looks a lot like the old tool, a tool we’ve been using for many years now. In many ways it is very different. This tool is, of...
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