The one thing I would have you know about Ed is that he’s a real-life renaissance man. When Ed’s not skydiving, full-stack engineering, being an amazing father, devoted husband, raising chickens, snowboarding, making tomato sauce or being a mentor, Ed can be found moving all of his worldly possessions back and forth between the states of Kansas and Washington.

The V8 team (the JavaScript engine that powers Chrome, Opera, Node.js, MongoDB, etc…) are moving forward with an experiment in defining a stronger version of JavaScript that ensures that code being run is behaving well, and introducing run-time typing based on TypeScript’s typings. V8’s motivation is always performance, and a more stringent set of ECMAScript would obviously allow them to tune the engine to streamline performance, but are there other benefits? Update: Status of the V8 strong mode experiment.

SitePen’s team of JavaScript experts provide high quality development and production support to a wide range of companies, from the Fortune 500 to small startups. Recently, we had the opportunity to assist BuyWinR, a company based in Brisbane, Australia.

Transpiling or compiling code has become a necessity today for JavaScript-based web development. Whether you are using TypeScript, Babel, Dart, Traceur, or CoffeeScript to provide additional language features, or trying to optimise your code with the likes of UglifyJS, r.js, or Closure Compiler, once you have modified your source code, you start to run into challenges.

In line with SitePen’s continued growth, we’re excited to announce that Kitson Kelly has joined the SitePen team as our new Chief Technology Officer. Kitson, who usually goes by just Kit, brings a wealth of technical knowledge and engineering leadership, as well as some interesting British humour to the table.

SitePen is a huge supporter of TypeScript. It allows our developers to write using modern standards support for ES6 and some ES7 features while still targeting ES5 browsers.

You can use Intern to test just about everything!  How about testing your Grunt tasks?  Even though Intern focuses on tests authored as AMD modules, it certainly can be used to test CommonJS modules, like those used with Grunt. (As well as TypeScript, ES6 modules, and non-module code) Why would you want to test your Grunt tasks under Intern? Well, for all of the advantages that Intern brings, like integrated code coverage analysis, CI integration, etc.

So you’ve had a chance to try out Intern Recorder, our new Chrome DevTools extension for recording functional tests, and now you want to efficiently work these tests into your workflow? This post will guide you through these steps and provide helpful advice for improving the tests you record. The goal with Intern Recorder is to reduce the tedium of creating functional tests by 80-90%, but to make tests work flawlessly, you still have some steps to follow to perfect them.

Intern Recorder is a new Chrome Developer Tools extension that makes creating functional tests for Intern faster and easier. The Recorder automates test creation by recording your interactions with a page in Chrome and converting those interactions into a test file that can be downloaded and added to your Intern test suite.