Bring Architecture to Your CSS

Good article on CSS Architecture: http://engineering.appfolio.com/2012/11/16/css-architecture/

Philip Walton starts by saying what he wants a CSS architecture to provide – what would be the value. Then he examines common anti-patterns that work against those values.  Finally he outlines some concrete suggestions.

His approach isn’t perfect.  It leads to long class names and more of them.  He does do a good job showing what you get for the price.

Hope you enjoy it!

(Thanks to Daniel Sellers for posting the link on Yammer.)

paper-code helps you interview

github.com/ManagerJS/paper-code

In addition to writing daily for this blog, I’ve been scraping together resources that web devs and their managers might benefit from during interviewing.  I made the ManagerJS GitHub organization to hold those documents and code.

Today I’m announcing the paper-code repository.  It will hold programming challenges you can sketch out with pen and paper during interviews. I routinely use these when interviewing intern candidates.

Policies can unintentionally keep people from thinking

Policies established to create order often unintentionally keep people from thinking. “Let’s face it: corporate environments and modern organizations are the perfect setup for diminishing leadership and you have a certain built-in tyranny. The org charts, the hierarchy, the titles, the approval matrixes skew power toward the top and create incentives for people to shut down… Continue reading Policies can unintentionally keep people from thinking

Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Web Perf

I’ve had a lot of luck using this article to push performance conversations further. The numbers are dated but the concepts are real. You have to know how good is good enough. How bad is too bad to tolerate. You have to separate user interactions by value and user expectations. Here I break down user expectations… Continue reading Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Web Perf

JSCS lints and shines your JavaScript

If you use Sublime Text you may want to try the JSCS plugin for SublimeLinter. JSCS stands for JavaScript Code Style. What makes it even more useful than JSHint? With this plugin it will even fix small style errors for you!

Once you have the plugin working you’ll definitely want to  tailor the rules .jscsrc file.

One good gotcha: It ships with a lot of presets and has a lot of mirroring rule options. It might be tricky for you to override the preset.

For example, I opted for the Google preset and wanted to add the requireSpacesInAnonymousFunctionExpression rule. It wasn’t working until I realized the Google preset came with a mirroring option set: disallowSpacesInAnonymousFunctionExpression. I had to set that to null explicitly before my own settings would work.

Thank you to Addy Osmani for your post on the sublime plugin, and thank you to Josh at SublimeTextTips.com for mentioning it in your newsletter.

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