Nikki Mifflen-Mitchell I almost didn’t apply to work at silverorange. It was a total coincidence that I came to know the company was hiring a Director of People Management, and even so, I wasn’t looking for a new job at the time. Something about the job ad and company’s blog kept me coming back to look…
Steven Garrity Each December, Web developers around the world gather around the devilishly-named HTMHell Advent Calendar to uncover 24 great articles, tips, and tricks about security, accessibility, user experience, and performance on the Web. This year, our Lead Front End Developer at…
Steven Garrity How it started vs. how it’s going: A group photo of silverorange from 2002, three years after our founding (LEFT) and a group photo with most of silverorange (and some friends) as we were in August of 2024 (RIGHT). This week (in August of 2024), silverorange turned 25…
Maureen Holland I booked some professional development time this year to virtually attend CSS Day 2024. This is a 2-day single-track conference focused on the weird and wonderful world of Cascading Style Sheets. It’s hosted in Amsterdam, which I had forgotten until I looked at the schedule and…
Maureen Holland Last Thursday, we celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments. Practically speaking, this means…
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 communication is very short. And there’s no pressure from deadlines! You don’t even have to launch the thing in the end if you don’t feel like it. This…
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 stepped away to focus on his family and his family business, he pointed out that he had donned the title of CEO almost as a matter of course. The…
Maureen Holland We recently had a chance to investigate an issue around heading elements missing accessible names. This is particularly problematic for <h1/> elements, which designate the most important heading on a page. The common thread of this problem was our use and misuse of SVG…
Steven Garrity One of our developers was researching best recommendations on password requirements for a new project. The discussion naturally led us back to the classic Password Strength comic from XKCD. The comic includes the (good) advice to use memorable-but-nonsensical passphrases rather…
Maureen Holland When website developers debug a styling issue, we often ask ourselves (several times, in a tone of increasingly frustrated disbelief): Why is it doing that? Credit: Zazzle It’s ultimately very satisfying when the problem is solved with a better understanding of CSS…
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 experiences that feel fast and responsive. I’ve even trumpetted the performance of this very site. On the Web, ‘performance’ tends to refer to fast…
Maureen Holland My early commits with the git version control system were monstrous, haphazard things. Hours of work bundled into a vague message, never looked at again. I began to notice pitfalls with this approach when I learned I could use git reset –-hard to restore my working tree to the…
Maureen Holland When I started my first enterprise coding job I was obsessed with my productivity — specifically, productivity as measured by tasks completed. I was hyper-aware of being the most junior member of the team and the only female developer. I knew I would struggle for ages over a task…
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 trying to do things perfectly. However when a team has chemistry, even the most stressful timelines can be tackled collaboratively and it’s…
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-supportive company, I reached out to the team to get their feedback. I wanted them to answer a question: What have you noticed or learned…
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 blog on Medium for the past few years, we’ve migrated the silverorange blog to our own self-hosted alternative. Medium worked well for us, and…
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 at silverorange into Prince Edward Island for a week of work with the rest of the team in the office. We call it “Remote Week.” People come…
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 server-room, oVirt has become an increasingly important component of our infrastructure. We’ve been using oVirt for a number of years, and have…
Steven Garrity 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of silverorange. We’ve gathered the following selection of blog posts helps mark this anniversary: Be kind. The 20th anniversary silverorange art project 20 Years of silverorange party! silverorange & Pride My Mother’s…
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 importance of kindness as kids. Whether it was showing appreciation with a thank you or playing with the new kid, it was the childhood golden…
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, and the highlights of our 2018 retreat. Hey, we look pretty good in 2019! About half of the silverorange team is now based in Prince…
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 normalize the struggles we all face. As 50% of our company is remote, we often share these things on Slack and use Reactji to show support with…
Nick Burka Today silverorange slices in British Columbia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have been participating in climate protests. Here are a few photos we took. That yellow building in the background is our Charlottetown silverorange office! …
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, chats, and other forums is shared with participants. It’s great to see who you’re collaborating with, but in some cases it can act as an…
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 pieces of visual art to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of silverorange. The response was delightful. We first showed these pieces at…
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 for a party in Charlottetown, PEI. It was an evening of wonderful food (oysters, potato bar, and even Cow’s ice cream), meeting up with…
Isa Grant A twenty-years late celebration of our company queerness A rainbow of rainbows: the current known pride flags of the silverorange team. Pride month may be over, but Pride events are just starting in the cities we at silverorange live in. I’m writing this in…
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 I’ve been thinking lately about how my mom inspired and mentored many of us when we launched our company. She also had a major impact on the…
Nick Burka At silverorange, we recently helped launch the Government of Canada’s Connecting Families initiative—a program helping eligible low-income Canadian families get low cost internet access at home and to help get families online who have never been able to before. The goal The…
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 businesses joined together—MetaMedia and Whitelands Studios. A collage of things we thought were cool in 1999. We obviously needed a name for…
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 secure method instead of a password. This is brand new stuff and exciting because passwords are terrible! The success of a new standard…
Steven Garrity An informal presentation on how to get better at receiving and acknowledging feedback. What follows began as a brief presentation I made internally at silverorange. I’ve never been great at taking feedback or criticism. Few people are. I’m trying to get better at it. These are…
Nick Burka Kiva Loans and Monthly Donations at silverorange The first installment of our “20 years of silverorange” series. At silverorange we try to take a caring approach to work and the world. We make an effort to tackle meaningful projects (for instance, we recently helped launch the…
Steven Garrity Published once every 17 years! The four horsemen of the custom avatar: Near, Far, Missing, & Super-wide-logo I’ve written an article about the value of using difficult data when designing for the Web (placeholder text, media, etc.). I’m honoured to have…
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 silverorange. (NOT TO SCALE) THE WAVE 👋 As a company distributed across Canada (and Ecuador), we span four time zones. This makes the morning…
Nick Burka How many codes do you deal with every week? Between promotion codes, access codes, student IDs, and two-factor authentication codes, entering gibberish text has become part of our everyday. But if you’ve ever tried typing out an Amazon gift code or software license code, you know…
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 at celebrating our achievements. We’ve always focused on what we can do better rather than what we’ve actually done. Even in the midst of…
Nick Burka We held our annual winter retreat near Wolfville, Nova Scotia this year in a beautiful and tranquil old farmhouse complete with cats, horses, and an alpaca. Besides the nuts and bolts of our usual retreat meetings and reflections, we also threw axes at Timber Lounge, and…
Steven Garrity A gift 100 years in the making Photos by Stephen DesRoches We bought the beautiful century-old Victorian G.A.W. Robertson House from architect David Bergmark in 2003 to use as silverorange HQ. In the time since, it’s been painstakingly restored and granted a…
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 there probably are more efficient caffeine delivery systems, these are some of our favourite mugs to pour coffee into our faces and not our…
Nick Burka Pablo Stanley recently released an amazing Sketch avatar library called avataaars. I took it for a spin tonight and tried creating the whole silverorange team in avatar form. Team Avatars (updated August 2019) I love that we look like we all go to the same hairdresser…
Steven Garrity Reflecting on the ways we’ve matured as silverorange enters its 19th year. silverorange in 2002: shorts on the left, pants on the right. In the beginning silverorange was founded 18 years ago by a group of seven young men with a fairly homogeneous set of…
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 the founding of silverorange, we've been looking back at how our silverorange.com website has changed with our business. We’ve always kept our…
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, we love a good set of standards. In working with our friends at the IWK Health Centre in Nova Scotia, we’ve learned of an interesting…
Steven Garrity silverorange is a small design and development agency based in Canada. We’re hiring for two positions: Web Developer (Node/React) Accepting applications until July 16, 2017. Designer (Web & Mobile App) Accepting applications until July 31, 2017. Remote working is just as…
Steven Garrity UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED Future job openings will be posted here on our blog and via @silverorangeinc on Twitter. silverorange is a small design and development agency based in Canada. We’re looking to hire another back-end web developer. Remote working is a…
Steven Garrity silverorange is looking to hire a project manager (update: applications closed) UPDATE: THIS APPLICATIONS FOR THIS POSITION ARE CLOSED Future job openings will be posted here on our blog and via @silverorangeinc on Twitter. silverorange is a small design and development agency…
Nick Burka Stephen DesRoches brought his drone to our retreat this year and took some wonderful airborne footage.
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 and used it as a platform to learn and experiment. It served its purpose well but we have since decided to shut it down. The goal of Neon…
Steven Garrity Read about some of the lessons we learned running design sprints and working with clients in the world of healthcare: Sprint Stories: Running a design sprint in a healthcare organization
Steven Garrity UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED Future job openings will be posted here on our blog and via @silverorangeinc on Twitter. silverorange is a small design and development agency based in Canada. We’re looking for an excellent back-end web developer to help us build new…
Steven Garrity This Visa appears to be using the CSS ‘perspective’ property, and maybe a filter:blur(); — photo is CC BY 4.0 The credit card industry is about to require security practices that will preclude support for Internet Explorer 10 and older. The story of how and…
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 (plus about 1½ days for travel) at a beautiful home in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick. We used the time to look back at the past year while…
Nick Burka In 2003, silverorange moved our offices to a beautiful heritage building in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island called the G.A.W. Robertson House. The century-old Victorian building hadn’t been well maintained for many years and had been crudely subdivided into two units before…
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 will focus on how it is organized. Our temporary home in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick for a week in January 2016. We held our first…