On CSS Specificity
It might surprise you that a sizeable portion of the Mailchimp product has a basic CSS architecture. Philisophically it’s not far from Tailwind — Reusability focused utility classes drive component creation. Semi-officially the approach was known as Object Oriented CSS accompanied with Less as a preprocessor and BEM for naming. Yeah, the approach is long in the tooth, but hey it’s profitable.
Rules
Inspired by the destroytoday wiki, these rules follow me from project to project.
You shouldn’t be afraid of rebase
I’ve heard a few people say you should avoid using git rebase. That’s crazy! Like many commands, it has a use case and is actually pretty awesome. Rebase allows you to modify your git history and move or update commits. Just some of the ways to use git rebase:
Pruning remote branches
MailChimp HQ has been running on something akin to the GitHub flow for a while now. Side effect of this strategy is there are So. Many. Branches.
The Wonderful Web: The Color Purple
Free Apple device mockups for your projects
As a designer, one of the best ways I have found to improve the professionalism of my design projects has been to present mockups of how the product will look on a real device. As the designers of Facebook Home said, leave nothing to interpretation.
Local git and Jekyll tip
A couple of weeks ago this site was rebuilt using Jekyll and moved to Github Pages. If you want to learn more about Jekyll + Github, checkout the Github site.
Symbolic Links For Your Development Environment
If you do any local WordPress theme or plugin development, I think I can save you some precious time. When I was developing and testing WordPress themes I found myself having to manage more than 4 separate installations of WordPress per computer (I regularly switch between 3).
Review of UI Stencils
One of the coolest trends that I am happy to see returning to the area of web design is the sketching of simple mock ups as part of the design process. I, like many of you, have jumped straight into code or Photoshop and ended up wasting time attempting to achieve pixel perfection.
Review of Total Terminal
In this post I will be discussing a really cool application that makes the process of dealing with the Terminal app a breeze. TotalTerminal works by showing and hiding the Terminal window through a keystroke. Anyone who has used the console in certain games will be familiar with the behavior. This program works great for heavy Git users.