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Git-workflow vs feature branching

When working with Git, there are two prevailing workflows are Git workflow and feature branches. IMHO, being more of a subscriber to continuous integration, I feel that the feature branch workflow is better suited, and the focus of this article.

If you are new to Git and Git-workflows, I suggest reading the atlassian.com Git Workflow article in addition to this as there is more detail there than presented here.

I admit, using Bash in the command line with the standard configuration leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to awareness of state. A tool that I suggest using follows these instructions on setting up GIT Bash autocompletion. This tool will assist you to better visualize the state of a branc

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Sass is a powerhouse language that is adding new features all the time. For this introduction we will go over the basics of the language and see how they all tie together. We will discuss nesting, parent selector definitions, variables, Sass math, @extends, and @mixins.

Code comments

Commenting your code is the number one awesome thing any developer can do. In CSS you can place comments in your code /* */, but this will appear in the actual CSS and sometimes you don't want or need all that stuff to be there.

In Sass comments are highly encouraged. Sass has what are called 'silent comments' using the // syntax. This will allow the developer to comment like crazy and none of this is exposed in the final CSS. An interesting feature is that Sass supports both types of comments.

Scss

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The Internet is a strange and wonderful place. It never fails to amaze me the things people come up with. And what also never fails to amaze me is the effort we put into making simple tasks more complicated. For the new year, it is my hope to bring us back to the simplicity of things.

Blogging

Ahhh, blogging. Something to simple and so mind blowing. It revolutionized how we as individuals communicate on the web, it's simple platform from which we could add more to the conversation was simply awesome. Average people with much to say came out in droves. By lowering the level of entry, the increased levels of knowledge that poured out rivals anything in human history.

Bloggers

Here is where out story takes a twist. As more and more bloggers got involved into blogging, IMHO it began to lose focus. Blogging became more about a platform and how developers could harness this new technology and start build web sites from it. I am not taking away the contributions of skilled developers out there, but at o

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As professionals we look to always optimize our workload. Through better processes and shortcuts we can eliminate unnecessarily repetitive tasks. One of the tools I use quite often is the Command Line Interface (CLI) and Git, and this is an area that we can automate quite extensively through some really simple to learn BASH hacks.

We all have tasks that we do endlessly, and there are tasks that we do independently and don't realize that there is a definitive pattern that we can embrace, put them to use in a simpler function and alter the results on a per use basis. It is through years of doing things the hard way that I have found some simple tricks that makes my life much easier to maintain.

What is BASH anyway?

Let's get this out of the way quickly first. In short, it is a Unix shell and command language most common on Linux and macOS and recently has made it's way to Windows as well. It is the common interface for running simple commands or other applications such as GiT, Curl, Ack, etc ...

If you

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// ----
// libsass (v3.1.0-beta)
// ----


$map-one: (color: orange, height: 100px);

.block {
  color: map-get($map-one, color);
}

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<ul>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>
  <li class="swatch tint-base"></li>

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by Dale Sande

CSS has had a long and sordid past. A developer never sets out with the goal of making a complete and total mess of things. Their intention is not to build something that is practically illegible, impractical to maintain and is limited in scale. But somehow, this is where many inevitably end up. Luckily, all is not lost. With some simple strategies, organizational methods and out-of-the box tools, we can really help get that junk-drawer inline.

For many of us getting started with Sass, at one time or another have created a junk-drawer of files. For most, this was a rookie mistake, but for others, this is a continuing issue with our architecture and file management techniques. Sass doesn't come with any real rules for file management so developers are pretty much left to their own devices.

Large CSS files and increased complexity

CSS started out with very simple intentions, but as [tableless web design][1.1] began to really take a foothold, o

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<div id="copy">
  <ul>
    <li class="more-copy">
      <p class="copy">
        hello
      </p>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

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by Dale Sande

Ok, so here is the issue I need to solve. In the style guide I am writing I had a ton of repeated code. In order to display all these elemental parts of a design, each element needs to be an OOCSS class.

It is my desire to only use these classes in the style guide CSS, but not production. This lead me down the path of creating silent placeholders to be extended in the production CSS, but be made into OOCSS classes for the style guide.

Refactoring for life

To start out I long-hand wrote all the code. Each silent placeholder followed up by the OOCSS class that you would extend it. There has to be a better way.

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Draft Episode 15: Why Sass? raises a very interesting question. "Do you really have to use Sass?"

by Dale Sande

For the most part, no you don't need Sass to get work done. The internet has been around for a long time and CSS was here WAY before Sass and people were able to get work done. But is this really a valid argument?

You can say the same for any new development language, innovation or advancement. Do we need Python, Ruby, C#, Clojure, Node or Dart? After all we have C, Perl, PHP, Java and Javascript. Do we need new languages to do the same things? But are we really doing the same things?

Innovation pushes us all forward