blog

Sometimes CSS falls short in achieving the desired layout. I've recently refactored a handful of Javascript Layout Hacks I've regularly re-used as CommonJS modules and made them available via NPM.

I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with another developer on a project. Being somewhat more comfortable with Git than was my collaborator, I took the lead on source control. What follows is a quick and dirty cheat sheet I wrote for the basics of a Git + GitHub workflow.

I had a very busy spring and summer this year. Since then, I, along with my clients and collaborators have being doing post-mortems on some of these projects and trying to figure out how we can improve our processes.

What follows is an outline I drafted for an improved process.

WordPress isn't my favourite platform to develop on, but WordPress development often pays the bills for me. In part one of a series I'm going to discuss how I set up my local machine for WordPress development, building the foundation for a process that improves my workflow and makes WordPress more fun.

I recently found myself collaboration on a project with a developer who had just made the switch to Mac after developing for years on Windows machines. He wanted some advice on how to get up and running. I sent him the following:

It's been a busy, busy few months and with paid work on the go it's been hard to keep up with my personal portfolio page. I've learned so, so much more as an independent contractor than I ever did in school. With a few regular clients and a couple of mentors I've been blessed with numerous opportunities to work in a variety of frameworks and see the software architecture of a number of big projects.

Over the Course of the holidays I read through a few more titles from A Book Apart. It's taken me a little while to get around to posting about them, but hopefully I can still remember enough to make relevant commentary.

I decided to read a couple of books on typography as I knew that was a weak point for me when it comes to design. I suppose I knew what particularly bad typography looked like but when it came to choosing fonts for my own projects I haven't really known what to look for. Sans serif is easier to read on the web, right?

A week or three ago I made it my goal to create a login system and a database so that I might update my blog through a homemade CMS rather than tweak the html every time.

Voracious reader that I am I've been doing my best to supplement the course material I've been given with other texts to help me understand the field I'm getting into. Much of this reading happens on blogs and other online publications, but I've picked up a handful of books too. Some of these have been particularly good reads, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on them. Here they are in reverse chronological order.