Will Little @wclittle Subscribe

Managing Director at Prota Ventures.
I'm a bioengineer-turned-software-developer and venture builder/investor. Learn more about me professionally on LinkedIn, personally here, and check out the podcast I host, Ventures.

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 Will Little

Dec 31, 2012
Software Development JavaScript CSS

Step-by-step “Hello World” examples in HTML, CSS, SASS, JavaScript, jQuery, and CoffeeScript

We're now at the point in our web and mobile development series where we'll jump right into setting up the app we'll be building step-by-step together. This will be a practical, hands-on introduction to a dozen web-app related programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. When we're done with this and the next two posts, we'll have the foundation of our app ready to receive and merge in the pretty stuff from our visual designer (which we'll do later in this series). You ready? Let's go.
Will Little

Dec 26, 2012
Software Development Ruby on Rails

A quick introduction to Embedded Ruby (a.k.a. ERB, eRuby)

Before we dive directly into Ruby on Rails app development, after reading the Ruby introduction post in this series it is worth taking a moment to understand the concept and practice of Embedded Ruby.
Will Little

Dec 18, 2012
Startups Software Development

Introducing the app we’ll be building publicly step-by-step

At this point in our web and mobile development series I'll introduce you to the specific app we will be building together. We'll follow the steps we mentioned in my previous post “So you have an app idea. Now what?” — which means I'll attempt to actually “walk the walk” and follow my own advice.
Will Little

Dec 16, 2012
Startups

So you have an app idea. Now what?

Having already introduced the major software tools we'll be using as we move forward in our web and mobile development series, here we'll pause for a moment to consider the process of what to do, step-by-step, after you get an idea for an “app” (which we'll define generally as user-facing software, knowing the modern context is usually browser-based and native-mobile interfaces).
Will Little

Dec 12, 2012
Software Development

A quick introduction to Backbone.js

As we wrap up the “quick introductions” part of our Introduction to web and mobile development series, here I'll be presenting Backbone.js — a JavaScript framework that plays nicely with jQuery and Ruby on Rails. This post jumps immediately into tying together the multiple markup and scripting languages that we've introduced thus far, so make sure you've at least scanned the previous posts and let's get going.
Will Little

Dec 11, 2012
Software Development JavaScript

A quick introduction to XML and JSON

Moving forward with our web and mobile development tutorial series, here we'll be briefly introducing Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), both of which are commonly used with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to pass data back and forth between software programs (or to simply store data).
Will Little

Dec 4, 2012
Software Development

A quick introduction to CoffeeScript

As we near the end of our high-level summaries of the basic software tools used by modern-day web developers, here in our Intro to web and mobile app development series we'll introduce you to a magnificent, fun-to-write, meta-level, and transcompiling language (i.e. converts to one language from another) called CoffeeScript.
Will Little

Nov 29, 2012
Software Development

A quick introduction to Git

At this point in our app development tutorial series we're going to take a moment to introduce Git, a version control system (VCS) that developers use to (1) collaborate with others, (2) ensure every line of code ever written on a project is saved, and (3) hook into automated testing and deployment work flows to make their jobs easier.
Will Little

Nov 27, 2012
Software Development Ruby on Rails

A quick introduction to Ruby on Rails

Moving forward with our tutorial series teaching beginners how to build modern-day apps for web and mobile devices, today we're going to take a brief, high-level look at Ruby on Rails and it's Model-View-Controller architecture to give you a better understanding of what all the fuss is about.
Will Little

Nov 20, 2012
Software Development

A quick introduction to Ruby

Continuing with our Introduction to web and mobile development series, we'll be making an important jump here from front-end code rendered by web browsers (e.g.HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) to back-end code (e.g. Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, etc.) which is interpreted by behind-the-scenes on servers.
Will Little

Nov 13, 2012
Software Development

A quick introduction to jQuery

After taking a brief look at JavaScript in the previous post in this series, I'll now turn our attention to what is arguably the most popular (and essential) JavaScript library among web developers today: jQuery. In general, libraries are used by developers to both save time and to establish best practices/conventions, and indeed, jQuery accomplishes both feats.
Will Little

Nov 6, 2012
Software Development JavaScript

A quick introduction to JavaScript

I've opened this series of web & mobile development tutorials with a quick look at HTML and CSS. Now it's time to dive into a scripting language that can be used for all kinds of things from running web servers, video games, and robots, to doing things in web browsers like validating forms before sending data to your back-end server (wooohooo! exciting, I know. Stay in your seat and let's do this).
Will Little

Nov 1, 2012
Software Development CSS

A quick introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Continuing our series of introductory tutorials for building web and mobile applications, here we'll cover Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is intended to control the visual design of your markup (HTML) and respond to simple mouse events (e.g. hovering).
Will Little

Oct 13, 2012
Software Development

A quick introduction to Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

HTML has now evolved five generations and has all kinds of fancy new capabilities. It is, however, still in a slightly awkward phase because there are still some browsers that do not fully support it. This means when we use HTML5 we need have to have graceful fall-back options (which is called unobtrusive programming). We'll talk more about this in later tutorials.
Will Little

Oct 11, 2012
Startups Software Development

Introduction to web and mobile development for startup founders

This series of tutorials is a fast-paced, step-by-step, get-to-the-point introduction to building, deploying, and scaling software applications for desktop and mobile devices.