Tech student Tim Green put together a pretty slick set of features and shortcuts for GitHub and Git I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. Some of the command line Git tricks were my favorites; I had no idea you could style git status with the ‘-sb’ modifier or trivially jump to the previous Git branch with a wildcard symbol.
As I came to understand quickly with my day job, working with international dates can be a major pain across different languages on the web. Not only are you dealing with traditional localization issues, but the format and order often changes significantly. For a while I tried relying on a simplistic in-house JS solution, but that fell apart as our site expanded to a progressively higher set of languages.
Moment.js is an excellent solution to this date problem. Download the languages you need and you’ll find yourself up and running very quickly, whether the issue is display or more complex manipulation.
If there’s one thing that’s extremely common in web-based grid frameworks, it’s their consistency of design. Generally you see twelve to twenty four columns all with exactly the same proportional width. Designer Nathan Ford takes a different approach: start with your site’s content and design a grid system based on visually pleasing, historical ratios. It leads to often irregular, columns for your content, far from the norm as far as traditional web design boilerplate is concerned.
Mark Serrels, writing for Kotaku:
I can’t remember another transition that has felt so half-hearted, so conservative, so burdened by a reluctance to place proper, major bets on new technology…Despite the fact that the Xbox 360 and PS3 had been at the forefront of one of the longest generations I can remember, there was the sense that no-one had faith in the next generation of consoles.
Everyone was in a secure, definitive holding pattern.
As Mark goes onto write, both the Xbox One and PS4 have been selling very well, far better than a lot of the naysayers predicted. The results:
Now we have millions of new console owners with brand new boxes in their homes and nothing to do with them. Because development is long term game. It’s a big arse ship on the open sea and it takes an incredible amount of time to make an about turn.
It’s here that I think there’s more to the story. It’s true that pivoting fast is extremely difficult for AAA titles – true big budget PS4 and Xbox One exclusives (as in, not on any other console platform) should remain few and far between for this reason for a pretty long time, at least another year or two. You’re going to see a lot of cross-gen games with upgraded graphics on the Xbox One and PS4 and little changes elsewhere. Not only are big budget titles hard to switch up mid stream, the very nature of it being high budget and thus high risk makes it important to keep the sales base as wide as possible across multiple platforms.
But I do think indies, will fill out the release calendar significantly. It’s already the case with my PS4: this is the first console I’ve ever owned where smaller indie games like Resogun, Pinball Arcade and Mercenary Kings have about as much combined play time as the more traditional, big budget AAA releases like Assassin’s Creed 4 and Infamous: Second Son.
Influential developer Julie Ann Horvath was recently in tech news for her public resignation from GitHub over harassment during her two year tenure. It’s illuminating hearing her story first hand and underlines a startup tech culture that’s can be very unfriendly towards women. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s important for the community to hear more stories like this so it can actively change for the better.
It’s not just a talk about Julie’s GitHub work experience either; she gives advice for moving your tech career forward, sharing workload among a team and much more.
Designer Eric Portis goes over the many growing pains for the web and responsive images. There’s a lot code, a lot of math, and generally a lot of trouble. Note Eric’s proposed solution – a single img tag with both srcset and sizes attributes – doesn’t exactly look like what browser manufacturers fully agreed upon as of last month. But even with the slightly more verbose picture element, the srcset and sizes idea remains. I especially loved Eric’s illustrations on this post; they’re smart and funny.
For beginners, CSS selectors and selector specificity can be tricky to properly understand without significant trial and error. Fortunately Luke Pacholski created this smart little game to help you learn properly. Clever.
Web developer and consultant Tim Kadlec:
The more multi-device work you do, the more you discover that the toughest problems to be solved aren’t related to technology. The toughest problems are related to people, process, workflow and politics…
…Transitioning from the traditional waterfall/siloed approach to a fluid process where designers and developers are working more closely together can be a very difficult adjustment. Not only do you have to battle the internal politics involved in such a move, but you have to experiment to find the right comfort level. Until organizations make that transition it’s natural for things to be off-balance a little bit.
Exactly. As I’ve written myself and linked to elsewhere, responsive web design is more than a few tweaks and fixes taken in isolation. It’s a change in workflow that requires buy in from several key players.
I had a fun time using Dayle Rees’s color schemes in Sublime Text a month ago. But lately I’ve been using this alternative color scheme that’s a touch less colorful than Rees’s yet works beautifully for my coding style. Its got an interesting theme as well, but I found it a bit too spaced out for my tastes (I pair the color scheme with Flatland.) By designer Jaime Wilson.
Trent Walton:
A responsive site may have flexible grids, fluid images, and media queries, but if it also scroll-hijacks desktop monitors while stutter-scrolling on touch devices, auto-loads heavy videos that break data plans, or asks users to rotate their screens 90° for the full immersive experience, I’d argue it’s not device-agnostic. Many sites, responsive or not, are built only with ideal scenarios and a small set of devices in mind.