How Broken Glasses Led to Great Customer Service

Have you ever had those crazy weeks where everything goes wrong? That describes this week for me.

It all started Tuesday night. After dinner I dropped my glasses and the lens fell out. I squinted while trying to fix them but that just caused a massive headache. Concerned about staring at a computer the next day and the ensuing headache, I asked for the morning off so I could get them repaired. But not before fixing them myself:

glasses

Pretty genius right? I think so as well.

The next morning I dropped the kids off at school and went out on a mission to get them fixed. The first place I stopped, a nice lady welcomed me and asked what she could help me with. I told her my situation and she took the glasses back in a top secret room where I can only assume they do really cool stuff.

A few minutes later she came out and had not only fixed the problem, but tightened all the screws and even got the glasses bent back in shape. At that point I asked, how much do I owe you? It caught me by surprise when she said nothing.

I’m not sure if my genius™ fix made her feel sorry for me or if it was just the store policy. (I’m thinking the former) Either way for my future vision needs they have a new customer.

Rebuilding Wardrobe: Week 4

 

In this weeks Rebuilding Wardrobe series I started working on the list of posts. That sounds easy right? Grab all the posts from the database, loop them, and print them in table rows. But in our crazy world of web development it’s never that easy. One of the fields that should be included is the published date and that means I have to account for timezones. Yuck! Continue reading “Rebuilding Wardrobe: Week 4”

This is an old but epic post discussing the pros and cons of each of these frameworks. I’ve been using Backbone heavily over the past two years and this quote really rings true to my experience:

I think Backbone is not a framework, when using Backbone you have to build a framework from the primitives it provides. This can be powerful or a burden and it mostly comes down to how much control you care to have.

In the end Ghost decided to go with Ember and the comments in the GitHub issue makes strong arguments for all three.

Setting up Gulp, Bower, Bootstrap Sass, & FontAwesome

Let’s face it. Managing front end dependencies is still a headache. As developers, we have a plethora of options for building dependencies. Some of the tools off the top of my head are Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli, Component, NPM, and probably 5 more have been released since I started writing this post. In this tutorial, I am going to focus on Gulp but I’m sure it can be modified to work with any of the others. Continue reading “Setting up Gulp, Bower, Bootstrap Sass, & FontAwesome”

iPhone 6 plus thumb zone

6-plus-thumbzone

A great graphic via mashable to keep in mind for building new iOS apps and for optimizing your mobile sites. I haven’t seen a plus in person yet, but being a short person this seems worrisome. The pictures I’ve seen make it look like an iPad mini mini.

Not only does Apple provide an API for interacting with the operating system and install apps, but they also provide an Objective-C bridge to work directly with native libraries such as Cocoa. This is HUGE.

That’s why the fact that Apple is now offering JavaScript for task automation is so compelling. It’s not that developers have been dying to write more task automations, it’s that we have all long been searching for a universal language for building applications. The fragmentation in mobile has agitated this to nearly a tipping point. Nobody wants to install different IDEs, learn different SDKs, and maintain separate code bases. It’s simply not sustainable. Cross-compilation is appealing for this reason, but results in enormously bloated apps and a level of complexity between the developer and the operating system that they cannot control. If there is one thing developers hate, it’s a black box.

I totally missed this announcement but indeed it’s very exciting and could be a huge step for bringing web developers into true app development. Hopefully, it gets integrated beyond just Automator.

This update cannot be installed because it requires at least 6.9 GB of storage. You can make more storage available by deleting items in Usage Settings.

— iOS 8

EVERY iOS UPGRADE, EVER!

This might be old news to you, but new to me:

In order to solve this problem, we decided to try to understand pages by executing JavaScript. It’s hard to do that at the scale of the current web, but we decided that it’s worth it. We have been gradually improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user’s browser with JavaScript turned on.

I just ran into indexing of JavaScript that was embedded inside an iFrame. I figured no way they could index that, I was wrong.

Typekit Typography Lessons:

Lessons walk through specific topics or methods in the practice of typography, with a clear objective or takeaway skill that can be immediately applied to design work.

A great resource for typography, one of things in web development that I struggle to get exactly right.

A writer with no head for business isn’t going to make a living with the words they write, no matter how glorious, how well-crafted, how extraordinary they are, outside an incredible run of good luck.

— Kameron Hurley on Writing as a business

This applies to developers as well. Even if you have no aspirations to start your own business, knowing about options, employee contracts, personal finance, and retirement would do you well.

The Wardrobe Diaries

 

I have been working on building a new version of Wardrobe, my little blogging app, and development has stalled as I’ve been swamped with other things. I have thought about it for a few months now and I’ve decided I’m going to do a complete rewrite. Lots of new features have been added to Laravel and with 4.3 on the horizon I think now would be a good time to revisit some of my original goals, and also add new features. Instead of just building it and releasing the finished product I want to do something a little different. I’m going to journal the entire process on this site – from blank screen until completion. Continue reading “The Wardrobe Diaries”

Pluck The Weeds In Your Code

Back in the spring, as I was walking back from the mailbox I noticed a tiny little green weed inside a purple bush. The bush hadn’t bloomed yet and was still bare from the winter. I briefly thought about going and pulling the weed, but I kept thinking:

  • I have 10,000 other things I need to do
  • It will still be their tomorrow
  • When the bush blooms it will block out the sun, and without sun it will die.

The third thought was partially right. The bush bloomed and the weed seemed to miraculously be gone. Out of sight, out of mind, they say.

Fast forward to the fall and I’m making my same trip to the mailbox and this time I see a huge green leaf coming out of the top of the bush. The little weed that would have taken 30 seconds to pull has now turned into a massive tree like structure.

I tug and I tug, it’s impossible to remove, the roots from both are all intertwined.

Now pretend that weed is a piece of nasty weird code that you come across in your app. Don’t be lazy, go improve it before it grows out of control.

This post is an excerpt from my Laravel News digest. A weekly email about the Laravel framework.

Building a jQuery Plugin with Gulp

With the current design of this site I wanted to have images in the content that stretch out beyond the container. I’ve seen this pattern used quite a bit recently and I think it gives a nice little visual “pop”. Implementation wise this is a pretty easy problem to solve by using negative margins. I decided I would use this as an opportunity to put together a little centerImg jQuery plugin and document my steps along the way. Continue reading “Building a jQuery Plugin with Gulp”

The latest Bootstrapped.fm podcast had myself and the rest of the UserScape developers on as guests.

In this episode, we sit down with the developers of Userscape; Eric Barnes, Chris Fidao, and Taylor Otwell, to talk about weird dreams, Eric’s, Chris’ and Taylor’s backgrounds and how they got started at Userscape, supporting open source, Forge, newsletters, servers, building Scribbleton for Linux, content-based products, deploying desktop apps, and TV shows