Project Detritus

24 Apr 2012

Zielun asks of managing projects: It often happens in projects that based on one, large system with tons of modules that can be enabled or disabled, and documentation is often not up-to-date or doesn`t exist at all. At least I have such experience. I know that real problem lies elsewhere like in project management but such things often plays main role when you or team decides which coding stan...

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CoffeeConsole: A Chrome Extension

06 Apr 2012

Harry Brundage, a co-worker of mine at Shopify, does a lot of CoffeeScript development and said he would love to be able to do CoffeeScript right from the console in Chrome's Web Inspector. I asked Paul Irish, a "dev relations guy" at Google, to point me in the right direction on building just such a thing. The result of today's pet project is CoffeeConsole, a Chrome extension that adds a new p...

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Definition Lists versus Tables

25 Mar 2012

I remember a couple years ago speaking at An Event Apart and mentioning how I don't use the definition list. I may have said it a few times, to the annoyance of the audience. When pushed on why I don't use definition lists, I mentioned that screenreaders read out that a term is equal to a definition. Somebody tested and confirmed with me afterwards that his particular screenreader did in fact read...

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Going Simple with JavaScript

05 Mar 2012

I was making a change to a page that needed to pull from a remote API and make changes to various parts of the page. Sounds like the time to pull out jQuery and Ajax, doesn't it? Instead, I just used old fashioned JavaScript. Actually, I used new fashioned JavaScript. Browsers haven't stood still in the advent of libraries and frameworks. As a result, we can take advantage of those feature...

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Prefixed Classes in Bootstrap

21 Feb 2012

Mark Otto talks briefly about their decision to use prefixed classes with Bootstrap. "Prefixed classes guide developers towards a simpler and more maintainable direction for building an extensive CSS design system." He goes on to say... "There’s no bleeding of styles or behavior from one component to another here because we treat components in a “successfu...

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My Notes on Writing an E-book

09 Feb 2012

So, yeah. I wrote an e-book. It has been an interesting experience and I thought I'd share a few random thoughts on how things have gone so far. Backwards When I first started down the path of writing the SMACSS e-book, I had intended it to be either an e-book or a printed book. After months of writing and not getting enough written, I released what I wrote as a web site. A free web site at ...

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Naming Convention in CSS

24 Jan 2012

My mind is on CSS quite a bit these days. At Shopify, I'm jumping into projects that already well under way. As a result, it's been a great way to look at what I wrote in SMACSS and see how applicable it is to yet another project. (As if Yahoo! wasn't already enough of a testing ground.) With Yahoo!, I (and a team of people) were writing the CSS from scratch and creating our mental map of the p...

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Handling CSS Transitions with prepareTransition

12 Jan 2012

Using CSS transitions can be quite fun. But what's not fun is when you want to transition something that needs to use display:none or visibility:hidden (or really, any non-transitionable property). For example, let's say you have a dialog. When the user clicks on the close button, you want the dialog to fade out — a simple transition from opacity:1 to opacity:0. The problem is that t...

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