Ruby Trick Shots: A Video of 24 Ruby Tips and Tricks
Nice little screencast by Peter Cooper of The Ruby Show fame. Also, get more Ruby tricks by following @rubytrickshots on Twitter.
Tutorial: Rails 3.2 with Ruby 1.9.3 on Heroku
This is a very thorough explanation of how to get a new Rails app running on Heroku (including how to use a custom domain). If you’re interested in doing such a thing, start here.
A Beginners Guide to HTML & CSS
Just getting started with HTML and CSS? Go here.
Over time, software builds up legacy. The old technology is baked in, and the roots of the product are so knotted that simply unwinding them becomes a massive undertaking. Think about trying to uproot a 250-year-old oak tree versus a two-year-old one.
Or, put another way:
“The bones of your software are all the bad decisions you made early on ossified over time. Sometimes you have to break them to move on.” - Zachery Bir
JavaScript pattern and antipattern collection
Hard to believe this is free.
Standard CoffeeScript Procedure
Here’s a quick one that I’ve really started to like. I’ve taken to setting up new projects with js and coffee directories in the root of the project. Then, I use Jitter to watch the coffee directory for changes. It automatically recompiles the JavaScript files every time I save my changes.
Jitter takes two arguments: your CoffeeScript directory, and your compiled JavaScript directory, like this:
$> jitter coffee js
So, when I start working, I run that command in the root directory of the project, and Jitter goes to work.
You can make it even simpler by setting up a Bash alias. Add this to your .bashrc or .bash_profile:
alias jjitter='jitter coffee js'
Now, when you start working, just enter jjitter, and you’re off to the races.
Profiling CSS for fun and profit. Optimization notes.
(via Perfection Kills)
Eye-opening and incredibly thorough. The news about border-radius bums me out; I love that property.
If I wrote a post saying “Don’t pass arguments to methods, just promote your data to a global” I’d be crucified. Yet we do the same thing (albeit on a smaller scale) every time we write a Rails application.
ActiveRecord (and Rails) Considered Harmful - Literate Programming
This is something that I’ve been actively ignoring over the years, but it secretly bothered me.
I’ve posted a couple of articles recently that were critical of some of the things I enjoy using, including CoffeeScript and Rails. This isn’t an attempt to troll visitors or start arguments. It’s more an attempt to encourage the 3 people who read this site to think about tools differently. Always question your tools. Hardware, software, whatever.
From a front-end development perspective, the mobile first approach also requires the default CSS rules go into the main style.css sheet and that we progressively enhance layout and further rules for larger screens using min-width: Media Queries.
Tom Milway - How To Build a Modern Website in 2011
If you’ve been looking for a succinct, plain-English explanation of how responsive design works, here it is.
