Rounding out
I’ve been rounding out my developer skills, by learning some front end design. I’ll be posting more about that in the future, but here’s a piece from the New Yorker on Google’s design evolution.
I’ve been rounding out my developer skills, by learning some front end design. I’ll be posting more about that in the future, but here’s a piece from the New Yorker on Google’s design evolution.
Last week, I signed up for close.io for my CRM. Their backend & examples are written in Python, so I wrote a web2lead app hooking in their API using Sinatra, HTTParty, and Slim.
I bashed my head in for a day, until I realized I needed a trailing slash on Lead.post(‘/api/v1/lead/ - ugh.
Hopefully, some of you can use this. Close.io has been a good service, and their customer service is very responsive. Waiting for Contactually to hook into Close.io!
1. 12 Hour Mucinex
2. Down with a glass of hot tea
3. Heaping spoonful of loquat syrup (it’s mostly honey anyways). Do not dilute with water.
4. Sleep on your side (I usually sleep on my back, but that seems to make it marginally worse).
This seems to do the trick for me, as the loquat gives me about 20-40 minutes to fall asleep without the throat irritation.
Debugging SASS/SCSS in Chrome takes a few extra steps. This tutorial took me 95% of the way, but I needed to enable the devtools experiments, first. FireSass for firebug/Firefox works fine, but if you like to do your css debugging in Chrome, here’s how you do it.
1. “Enable Developer Tools Experiments” in
2. Follow the instructions below. You should be golden.
How to make Chrome understand the SASS/SCSS in your rails app
Moving the Rails custom forms from Foundation 3 to 4 is a PITA, so in frustation, I’m taking my next project closer to the metal.
I’m utilising Bourbon.io, a scss library and Neat, a grid framework for Bourbon. It’s less code (for faster downloads), allows semantic naming, and fits well within SMACSS principles. This improves the end-user experience, the developer (me) experience, and I get to learn an easy to use framework I’ve been itching to try. That’s 3 wins. I’ll take it!
If you’re coming from Bootstrap, you make grids declaring CSS column classes in HTML:
Similarly for Foundation:
With Neat, you to apply the grid spacing to the CSS itself. It’s semantically cleaner, because you’re naming the layout piece - a span4 only refers to a column size. An article or a sidebar gives developers context to work with.
In retrospect, I should have called l-row l-header. l-row is an equivalent to the Foundation row class, and I don’t mind using an @include across my CSS classes.
If you’ve been using Foundation or Bootstrap, and want to get a better idea of what’s really going on underneath, while saving time through plenty of great mixins and shortcuts, I’d highly recommend Bourbon & Neat. The combo saves a ton of time vs rolling your own CSS from scratch, and doesn’t go overboard on overhead. After a few projects with Bourbon & Neat, you might occasionally go back to BS or Foundation for rapid prototyping, but I’m guessing you won’t.
AppAcademy got me addicted to learning technologies, and refining my new skills. This weekend, completed the wonderful RegexOne, which introduced me to the fundamentals of Regex - a concept I’d never understood until this weekend. I also covered CodeSchool’s RSpec, Rails Best Practice classes for review.
I’ve also decided that I need to learn at least one of the MVC Javascript front end frameworks. I’m skipping Backbone, for now, as I’ve heard you eventually need/want the features of the larger frameworks, and I’m going to wait on Ember, until the documentation improves, and there are nicer step-by-step tutorials.
Angular appears both accessible AND well documented, something everyone starting on a framework needs. I’ll let you know how it goes!
We began final projects, and what a difference one week of practice makes! Last week, it took 2 days to plan models & associations for a 7 table schema, and today, it took me 1 for a 10 table! I’ll take 2x improvement any day. This week only gets about 4 days for our final projects, so I’ll take it. My final project is WTFJS a mashup of JSFiddle & Stack Overflow.
This time around, I’m putting more time into planning tools, which is already paying off. I drew ER-Diagrams using Sketch a fantastic vector drawing tool, and rails-erd served as a sanity check that I didn’t miss any pluralizations or other possible mistakes in the implementation of said diagrams. I’m also creating stories using PivotalTracker.
It’s the last week of AppAcademy, and I’m starting to get a little emotional. I haven’t spent 8 hours a day learning with the same 16 people since… never. Even elementary school was a group of 30 people. And they’re all great, likable people.
Demo Day! For 5 days, there have been some impressive demos. What I’m realizing is that a little JavaScript goes a looong way. Yesterday, VoteCounter just took members, and counted votes.
Today, it’s got a user auth through Devise, permissions, but more importantly, it draws a frigging chart in your face as each vote is successfully registered in the application. That’s the feature that got all of the oohs and aahs.
I’m realizing that I’m spending a lot of time staring at code, trying to figure out a best practice way of doing it. While I’m not quite there (I still have a couple lousy names that I need to change), I want to get these patterns to the level where it’s automatic, and when I go back to my code, it’s easy to understand.
