anotheruiguy

An aspiring UX developer recently contacted me and asked some interesting questions. The one that really got me was, "I'd love to hear more about your course (i.e. who is involved, what types of people attend and what were your original motivations for offering such materials?)"

What was my motivation? Why are there so few schools that offer this kind of course? Well, here is my response.

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You sound like you are in the right track and learning some JavaScript will be beneficial for sure. More and more things will be going in that direction. jQuery is a good start, but be sure to spend some time learning the basics behind JS like ... what does it mean to be a loosely or dynamically typed language and what the hell is a prototype anyway? What is coercion and what it an object.

You make an interesting statement about JavaScript being a bridge between the front-end and back-end. What's interesting is that app engineers that were typically server side devs are now front-end devs because of JavaScri

anotheruiguy

Now that you know the basics of Sass, it's time to put these new skills to work in the best way possible. Learning the 'best practices' for writing Sass will gain you admiration among your peers.

This is a course I put together and working with the amazing team at Treehouse we created the Advanced Sass curse. If you have covered all the basics of Sass and are looking for more information on advanced topics, this is a great place to start. In this course I cover the following topics and much more:

• Getting started with architectural concepts.
• Digging deeper into Variables, Mixins, Functions, and Placeholders
• Color functions, random generators, strings and introspection
• Digging hard into Sass' directive library

So be sure to check out my Advanced Sass course and feel free to sign up for a free 14 day trial!

anotheruiguy

Sass 3.3 is out and you should start using Maps.

Using variables in Sass has been a core feature for years now. We have all used them to endless exhaustion and we have all seen things like this:

// establish a core color
$bravo_gray: #333;

// assign core color to semantic variable
$input-disabled-color:          $bravo_gray;

anotheruiguy

Forked from @HugoGiraudel

See the code in action on SassMeister

8674490

anotheruiguy

// ----
// Sass (v3.3.4)
// Compass (v1.0.0.alpha.18)
// ----

$types: positive negative passive aggressive;
$length: length($types);
$type-width: 20px;

@while $length > 0 {

anotheruiguy

Having spent the vast majority of my career in the front-end space, there has always been a thirst for better processes and management of resources. For those who have long histories with HTML and CSS, you remember the days of keeping folders of code snippets, our personal library of sorts, the cool code we wrote and wanted to have at the ready for our next project.

Sure there were desktop apps that tried to manage this for us, journler was my tool of choice back in those days. I have also seen some use Google Docs and other document and snippet managers, but they never really worked. And let us never forget all those really crappy websites that were supposed to be our saving grace. In the end, managing assets on the front-end has been nothing but a total fail.

Life meets Ruby, boy meets Git

When I began working with a Rails team, I was introduced to better solutions for managing libraries of reusable front-end code. Not to mention, this was my first exposure to Git and Github

anotheruiguy

tl:dr - the following is a long rant about the complexities of presentation layer development as it collides with the growing complexities of JavaScript front-end frameworks. This is a summary of my experiences, issues and proposed solutions to today's world of client-side application development.

Back in the old days (4 years ago)

It was a trend with the traditional model of app development that the app dev team would take a particular dominance over the presentation layer, as it was rightly so, their domain. The deign teams of the time resorted to non-code ways of communicating their intentions as to influence the design. The 'comp' and 'red-line' documents were the primary resource of communication. Practices that are not all that dead, people still do this stuff you know.

We all know by now that these processes don't really work. They are fraught with error and caused countless hours of frustration between designers and developers. Witness the rise of the 'designer - developer' or 'The Designer w

anotheruiguy

Run the following steps inside a clean directory

Not sure if you are in the same boat as I, but I could not find any good resource out there that pulled this all together. So here is a step-by-step tutorial for creating a Node.js app from scratch, adding in Grunt and then Node-Sass. Yeah, try and find good docs on Node-Sass alone :(

Hope this is of help!

Create your Node.js project

• npm init - create a clean node project
• NOTE: be sure to add "private": true, to the package.json so that your project is not globally distributed as a npm app

anotheruiguy

And my article is deprecated!

As of just writing this, Express 4.0 was released and there are points in there that no longer matter. So, this remains as a great >4.0 article.

Node.js is the red-hot new hotness! You can't throw a stick on the internet without hitting someone talking about Node. But why? For one, it's built on JavaScript which is completely ubiquitous. So, why not build a development stack and server on JavaScript? I would argue that the installation is almost painless while the terseness of the language is not.

While you can create apps 100% from Node.js, the Express framework is a great tool that helps you solve many standard problems without having to write boilerplate code.

Node.js is here and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. So if you are new to Node.js, Express, and even JavaScript in general, this is a great newb's step-by-step guide to get started.

anotheruiguy

There are a lot of great articles out there on how to set up Sublime text and all the reasons behind those choices. This is NOT one of those :)

Here is a quick list of things that are really popular with Sublime users.

Link Bash to Sublime

On the Mac - run this command in Terminal