silverorange slice logosilverorange Blog

The collective thoughts of web design and development firm silverorange

  • Hobby Sites and Modern CSS
    Maureen Holland  | 

    The joy of a hobby site is that the stakes are so low you could roll over them. You are your own client; therefore the chain of…

  • The Clarefication: A new CEO at silverorange
    Kelly Burke  | 

    The title of CEO means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Eight years ago when silverorange’s first CEO Dan James…

  • Accessible SVG Headings
    Maureen Holland  | 

    We recently had a chance to investigate an issue around heading elements missing accessible names. This is particularly problematic for…

  • The Canadian Goverment recommends: correct horse battery staple
    Steven Garrity  | 

    One of our developers was researching best recommendations on password requirements for a new project. The discussion naturally led us back…

  • CSS Interop is Awesome!
    Maureen Holland  | 

    When website developers debug a styling issue, we often ask ourselves (several times, in a tone of increasingly frustrated disbelief): Why…

  • Efficiency over performance
    Steven Garrity  | 

    Like anyone aiming to build great Web systems, we’re concerned with the performance of the systems we build. We want to craft…

  • Help git help you
    Maureen Holland  | 

    My early commits with the git version control system were monstrous, haphazard things. Hours of work bundled into a vague message, never…

  • Learning is Productive
    Maureen Holland  | 

    When I started my first enterprise coding job I was obsessed with my productivity — specifically, productivity as measured by tasks…

  • Roughing Things In - Commit small and merge fast as a team
    Malena Andrade  | 

    Here at silverorange our team has been growing faster than ever. Getting things done for a deadline can sometimes require letting go of…

  • Pride 2021 - What Does it Mean to Embrace Queer Culture?
    Nick Burka  | 

    The outpouring of corporate Pride Month good vibes and high fives is in full swing. Instead of just extolling our virtue as a queer…

  • Blogging about your blog is the bloggiest blog you can blog
    Steven Garrity  | 

    It turns out we’re not immune to the common web development trope of blogging about rebuilding your blog. After hosting the silverorange…

  • 2020 Remote Remote Week
    Malena Andrade  | 

    Our yearly in-person workweek now fully remote during the pandemic. Every August for the last five years, we’ve flown the remote folks…

  • Backing up oVirt VMs with Ansible
    Jayme Fall  | 

    Here at silverorange, we rely on a mix of our own hosting infrastructure and a variety of cloud-based services. In our on-premise…

  • 20 years of silverorange
    Steven Garrity  | 

    2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of silverorange. We’ve gathered the following selection of blog posts helps mark this…

  • Be kind.
    Kristen Ford  | 

    We could follow the instruction as kids, so why aren’t more companies doing it? Being kind isn’t new advice. In fact, we all learned the…

  • 2019 silverorange retreat
    Steven Garrity  | 

    We’ve just returned from our annual silverorange company retreat. For a bit of background, see our posts on Why we retreat, How we retreat,…

  • Serious Hugs
    Jacky Gilbertson  | 

    At silverorange we encourage our team to share the real aspects of their life—but only what they’re comfortable sharing, of course!—to…

  • #ClimateStrike protests
    Nick Burka  | 

    Today silverorange slices in British Columbia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have been participating in climate protests.…

  • Leaking presence
    Nick Burka  | 

    Our creative director Steven has written a post on his personal blog about the ways in which your online participation in shared documents,…

  • The 20th anniversary silverorange art project
    Steven Garrity  | 

    The 12 works of the 20th anniversary of silverorange art project We asked some of our friends and members of our team to create…

  • 20 Years of silverorange party!
    Nick Burka  | 

    To celebrate the twentieth birthday of silverorange we invited all of the people connected to the company over those two decades to join us…

  • silverorange & Pride
    Isa Grant  | 

    A twenty-years late celebration of our company queerness A rainbow of rainbows: the current known pride flags of the…

  • My Mother’s Mentorship
    Nick Burka  | 

    A Mother’s Day tribute to my mom, Martha Burka I’m writing this as part of silverorange’s “20 years of silverorange” series because…

  • Connecting Families
    Nick Burka  | 

    At silverorange, we recently helped launch the Government of Canada’s Connecting Families initiative—a program helping eligible low-income…

  • silverorange at 20: How silverorange was almost called Net Prophet
    Steven Garrity  | 

    Part of our 20 years of silverorange On August 11, 2019, silverorange will turn 20 years old. We were formed in 1999 when two small…

  • The Web is ready for your fingerprint, almost…
    Nick Burka  | 

    About a month ago, the W3C unveiled the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn), which is a way to sign into websites using a fingerprint or other…

  • How to receive feedback more better
    Steven Garrity  | 

    An informal presentation on how to get better at receiving and acknowledging feedback. What follows began as a brief presentation I made…

  • Being Charitable
    Nick Burka  | 

    Kiva Loans and Monthly Donations at silverorange The first installment of our “20 years of silverorange” series. At silverorange we try to…

  • Design with Difficult Data at A List Apart
    Steven Garrity  | 

    Published once every 17 years! The four horsemen of the custom avatar: Near, Far, Missing, & Super-wide-logo I’ve…

  • Office Emojification
    Steven Garrity  | 

    Semiotic Instability and the Birth of Emojis as a Tribal Language A few interesting patterns have emerged in our use of Slack at…

  • Usability for Promotion Codes and Access Codes
    Nick Burka  | 

    How many codes do you deal with every week? Between promotion codes, access codes, student IDs, and two-factor authentication codes,…

  • Learning how to celebrate with 🏆s
    Nick Burka  | 

    Using Slack’s Reacji Channeler to keep us positive. Our web agency silverorange does amazing work, but historically, we haven’t been great…

  • silverorange retreat 2018
    Nick Burka  | 

    We held our annual winter retreat near Wolfville, Nova Scotia this year in a beautiful and tranquil old farmhouse complete with cats,…

  • An architectural sketch is returned to its rightful home
    Steven Garrity  | 

    A gift 100 years in the making Photos by Stephen DesRoches We bought the beautiful century-old Victorian G.A.W. Robertson…

  • Mug for the camera
    Kristen Ford  | 

    What fuels a team? Inspiration? Grit? Can do attitudes? Just like the editorial team at Ars Technica, we gotta admit it’s coffee. While…

  • silverorange avatars
    Nick Burka  | 

    Pablo Stanley recently released an amazing Sketch avatar library called avataaars. I took it for a spin tonight and tried creating the…

  • A company on the verge of adulthood
    Steven Garrity  | 

    Reflecting on the ways we’ve matured as silverorange enters its 19th year. silverorange in 2002: shorts on the left, pants on…

  • A brief (18-year) history of silverorange.com
    Steven Garrity  | 

    A look back at how our silverorange.com website has changed since 1999. silverorange.com from 1999—2017 At the 18th anniversary of…

  • Ownership, Control, Access, & Possession
    Steven Garrity  | 

    The First Nations principles of OCAP® are de facto standard for how to conduct research with First Nations. As web designers and developers,…

  • silverorange is hiring
    Steven Garrity  | 

    silverorange is a small design and development agency based in Canada. We’re hiring for two positions: Web Developer (Node/React) Accepting…

  • silverorange is looking to hire a back-end web developer (Update: position filled)
    Steven Garrity  | 

    UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED Future job openings will be posted here on our blog and via @silverorangeinc on…

  • silverorange is looking to hire a project manager (update: applications closed)
    Steven Garrity  | 

    silverorange is looking to hire a project manager (update: applications closed) UPDATE: THIS APPLICATIONS FOR THIS POSITION ARE…

  • silverorange retreat 2017 from the air
    Nick Burka  | 

    Stephen DesRoches brought his drone to our retreat this year and took some wonderful airborne footage.

  • Neon: Quickly review stuff and share with your friends
    Steven Garrity  | 

    We at silverorange have been working on new product we call Neon. Update: The neon.io domain has a new owner. We had fun building Neon…

  • Running a design sprint in a healthcare organization
    Steven Garrity  | 

    Read about some of the lessons we learned running design sprints and working with clients in the world of healthcare: Sprint Stories:…

  • silverorange is looking to hire another excellent back-end web developer (Update: position filled)
    Steven Garrity  | 

    UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED Future job openings will be posted here on our blog and via @silverorangeinc on…

  • How the credit card industry is helping the adoption of modern web standards
    Steven Garrity  | 

    This Visa appears to be using the CSS ‘perspective’ property, and maybe a filter:blur(); — photo is CC BY 4.0 The…

  • How we retreat
    Steven Garrity  | 

    See the first part in this two-part series, Why we retreat silverorange held our 14th annual company retreat this year, spending four days…

  • silverorange office wins 2016 Heritage Award
    Nick Burka  | 

    In 2003, silverorange moved our offices to a beautiful heritage building in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island called the G.A.W. Robertson…

  • Why we retreat
    Steven Garrity  | 

    This is the first in a two-part series about our silverorange company retreats. It focuses on why we have a retreat, while the second part…