Sites of the Week for March 15th 2013. Getting Into Ember.js. Pro Workflow in Laravel and Sublime Text. My Talk and Slides from jQueryTO. On March 2nd and 3rd, I attended and had the privilege of speaking at jQueryTO, Canada’s first ever jQuery conference.
It was a really cool experience, and was especially cool because I finally got to meet in person certain developers that I’ve respected from afar for some time, including Darcy Clarke (who organized it), Paul Irish, Addy Osmani, Alex Sexton, and Adam J. Sontag. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile now, then you know that I have little, if any, business speaking at a JavaScript conference. Relational Databases for Dummies. TDD Terminology Simplified. The core idea of Test-Driven Development (TDD) is writing tests before writing any functional code, and then writing only the least possible amount of code required to make the tests pass.
It may sound strange to develop in this fashion, but it's actually quite useful, as the test base doubles as a partial specification of the main code. Given such a simple premise, however, there is an amazing amount of terminology and techniques. In this article, I gather the most important terms and buzzwords that you might hear, and define them. Modular CSS with Media Queries and Sass. Most developers nowadays are recognizing that if you’re developing large applications that have different views and states, it is best to take a modular or object-oriented approach to your CSS development.
When you throw media queries into the mix, however, the you can lose some of the benefits of modularity — code that’s easy to read, update, and maintain. Let’s look at different ways we can write our media queries, starting with what might be the most common approach — especially with those not yet using a preprocessor. The Common Approach To demonstrate what I think the majority of developers have done with media queries up to this point, here’s a simple example: In the first two rule sets in this example, we have two separate elements on the page styled without media queries.
After we declare those primary styles on our two elements, we then declare our media queries, repeating the same selectors, but with altered styles to suit the media features defined in the media queries. The Whens and Whys for PHP Design Patterns. There are plenty of articles that explain what design patterns are, and how to implement them; the web doesn’t need yet another one of those articles!
Instead, in this article, we will more discuss the and , rather than the and . I’ll present different situations and use-cases for patterns, and will also provide short definitions to help those of you who are not so familiar with these specific patterns. Let’s get started. Every few weeks, we revisit some of our reader's favorite posts from throughout the history of the site. 10 Free Mockup Backgrounds to Present Your Work. Windows Apps for Web Developers. When the editor of Nettuts+ requested an article to show Windows developers love by listing popular web development apps, I was all over it.
OSX devs get a lot of attention, so it's good to mix things up a bit. What I want to do is list the development tools that I frequently use as a web developer on Windows. It may not include your favorite, and if it doesn't, please let me know within the comments section. Sites of the Week for March 8th 2013. Streamline your Process with Volo. Front-end developers face a variety of challenges when creating sites that have repetitive solutions.
Check Out the New Recommended Resources on Nettuts+ We've added a new page to the site, which will help coders grab top quality software, tools and gear.
Headless Functional Testing with Selenium and PhantomJS. Let's build a system for performing functional tests on web applications, using Selenium and PhantomJS.
The resulting system will allow us to write easy test scenarios in JavaScript, and test those scenarios both in real browsers and a headless simulator. The obvious downside to Selenium is that it requires a full graphical desktop for any and all tests. To begin, we have to choose a browser control or emulation engine to simulate an end-user.
For a long time, the primary player in this field was Selenium, and it still is. Selenium allows for automated control of real browsers on real operating systems, which is its primary advantage: you can be absolutely certain that the tests represent reality as closely as possible. Responsive Design Is a Way Forward, Not for Everyone Though. February 26th, 2013 Author: admin Category : Responsive design 2 Flares Twitter 1 Facebook 1 Google+ 0 StumbleUpon 0 LinkedIn 0 inShare0 2 Flares × Responsive Web design has proved that it’s not a fad but a surefire way to the future – one that makes us daring, and responsible too.
But is it for you? Nobody knows what tomorrow holds for us. And thinking about it is often scary. Benefits. 10 Time Saving Online Color Tools for Web Designers. Working with colors is a time consuming task for a web designer, for starters you need to pick out a color palette for your designs, then there’s all kinds of code values to remember and convert from hex to RGBa.
To speed things up and make the designer’s life much easier a bunch of handy tools are available online. These tools help you pick, choose and convert your color selections with ease for your next web design project. If you’re starting a design from scratch with no brand guidelines or colour inspiration it can be tricky putting together a colour scheme that works. Here’s a few tools that will help you put together a pretty combination of colours that are guaranteed to work. ColourLovers. Best of Tuts+ in February 2013. Sites of the Week for March 1st 2013. Team Collaboration With Github. GitHub has become the corner stone for all things open source software. Developers love it, collaborate on it and are constantly building awesome projects through it.
Apart from hosting our code, GitHub's main attraction is using it as a collaborative tool. In this tutorial, let's explore some of the most useful GitHub features, especially for working in teams, making it all the more efficient, productive and, most importantly, fun! One thing that I find very useful is integrating the Github Wiki into the main source code project. This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with Git, the open source distributed version control system, created by Linus Torvalds in 2005. Your One-Stop Guide to Laravel Commands. In this day and age, it's quite normal for a developer to have an understanding of consoles, and how to issue basic commands. But what if you could code your own custom commands to improve your workflow? If we look back to Laravel 3, you might remember that it offered tasks. Tasks were extremely helpful, but still came up short for more complex operations.
Speaking With the Ember.js Core Team. Single page apps are the new hotness; everyone's trying to figure out the easiest way to build them. But it's more than just finding a couple of controls to slap together and sprinkling Ajax pixie dust on it. Building scalable and maintainable apps is serious business, which requires serious tools. Ember.js is a very serious framework for doing just that. Check out the interview I did with Ember.js Core Team leads, Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale, as they discuss what prompted them to begin the Ember project, its design philosophy, and where it fits into an already crowded library ecosystem.
Q Tell us about your professional backgrounds. How To Clean Up & Optimize Your WordPress Install. The Holy Grail of Conference Talks: Live Coding. Sites of the Week for February 22nd 2013. Beginning Test-Driven Development in Python. Strategies for Testing IE on Different Platforms. You might believe that web developers who use Windows as their primary OS have it easy, when testing Internet Explorer; simply click on the blue "E" and go to town. Testing Like a Boss in Laravel: Models. Sites of the Week for February 15th 2013. When to Avoid the Descendant Selector. Those of us who have started using modular or object-oriented CSS principles have learned to avoid, as much as possible, the use of the descendant selector (or, more accurately, the descendant combinator). Understanding Design Patterns in JavaScript.
Today, we're going to put on our computer science hats as we learn about some common design patterns. Design patterns offer developers ways to solve technical problems in a reusable and elegant way. Setting Up A Staging Environment. Event Based Programming: What Async Has Over Sync. Contracts: The Practical Side of Semantics. Birdbook - Social Networking for Birders. Building Ribbit in Django. Ruby on Rails Study Guide: Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas.
Using Web Debugging Proxies. Git Tips From the Pros. Laravel 4: A Start at a RESTful API. Chrome Dev Tools: JavaScript and Performance. How To Create a Simple Collapsing Header Effect. How to Write Code That Embraces Change. “One Best Ways” to Make Your Website Future-Friendly. Sites of the Week for February 1st 2013. A Peek at Internet Explorer’s Developer Tools. Sublime Text 3 Beta Released. JavaScript ‘this’ in Different Contexts. Why You’re a Bad PHP Programmer. Making Use of jQuery UI’s Widget Factory. Browsing Twitter Favorites From Talented Developers. Sites of the Week for January 25th 2013. Visual Studio: Web Dev Bliss. From Scrum to Lean. Ruby on Rails Study Guide: The History of Rails. Important Considerations When Building Single Page Web Apps. 25 Web Designs With Clever Fixed Header Effects. Better Workflow in PHP With Composer, Namespacing, and PHPUnit.
Sites of the Week for January 18th 2013. Selecting the Right Programming Language Made Easier. PSR-Huh? An Introduction to Source Maps. Why 2013 is the Year of PHP. Web Development and Tech Email Newsletters I Subscribe to. How to Use RequireJS with Backbone. Handy Tips For Creating a Cool Twitter Profile Design. Building Ribbit in Rails. Sites of the Week for January 11th 2013. SCRUM: The Story of an Agile Team. The First Ever Tuts+ Premium Sale. A Beginner’s Guide to HTTP and REST. My Current JavaScript Design Pattern. Best of Tuts+ in December 2012. How to Write a Laravel Bundle. Ways to Separate Good Drupal Developers from the Bad Ones. Sites of the Week for January 4th 2013. How I Test. Best Practices To Increase Your Mobile Commerce Sales. Learn Web Design The Right Way: Quit College And Start Sucking Blood [+VIDEO]
TNTAnderson Web Design News. The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story.