Posts
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Mar 19, 2016
Using Business Modules to Improve Code Clarity and Maintenance
As our applications grow in complexity, it becomes harder and harder to document and maintain the expected functionality of an application as well as figure out what to write unit tests against and what to leave for the automated QA testing.
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Feb 27, 2016
Create an Archives Page in Jekyll Without Using Plugins
Recently, I wanted to add an “Archives” to my site. While this can be easily done via a number of Jekyll plugins, Github pages (my site’s host) doesn’t allow custom plugins on their platform and won’t be adding an archives feature anytime soon. However, I did some experimenting and came up with a way to create a simple Archives page without using plugins.
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Feb 18, 2016
Flexible Mixin Params Using Maps
Mixins in Sass are great for dynamically generating CSS properties based on passed in variables. What you might not realize is how can use another feature of SASS — maps to add greater flexibility to what kind of parameters your mixins accept.
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Dec 28, 2014
Convert ID Properties Back to BSON from JSON
Recently, I started using Backbone with to build an app. As I started integrating an “edit” feature I ran into a rather vexing problem: my $oid fields kept getting converted to strings whenever I updated a document.
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Dec 20, 2014
Using Handlebars Templates With Backbone and Browserify
While working on a recent side-project, I ran into some trouble implementing Handlebars templates for my use in my backbone views when using Browserify for my dependency management.
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Dec 15, 2014
5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Using Recursion
Recursion can be a tough concept to grasp regardless of the language you decided to program in. In order to help developers who find themselves struggling with the concept (myself included), I’ve broken down the concept into five simple questions you’ll need to answer in order to write solid recursive functions.
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Dec 12, 2014
How to Make Gulp Copy a Directory AND Its Contents
I just got done switching one of my side-projects over to Gulp for the build process and I kept struggling with how to copy multiple folders from the src directory to the build directory in such a way that the directory’s contents and its original folder structure are preserved.
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Dec 11, 2014
How to Exclude Layout Files When Rendering Templates With Node.js and Express
I struggled with this for a good half-hour and I figured I’d share in case anyone else ran into this issue. Long story short, I needed to return an HTML fragment for a particular ajax request from the app (in this case, search results) but the response always included the layout file I configured for the app.
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Dec 8, 2014
How to Parse Responses From the StackExchange API Using Node.js
Currently, I’m working on a small side project that involves parsing the wiki entries for given tags on StackOverflow.
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Dec 8, 2014
Formatting Dates Using Moment.js, Handlebars, Express, and Node.js
For those of you out there that may be struggling with this, here’s a quick breakdown of how to format dates using moment.js, handlebars, express, and node.js.
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Nov 24, 2014
Helpful Tools For Web Developers: CodeWars.com
The ability to solve new problems efficiently is the hallmark of a good developer. When interviewing dev candidates, I don’t necessarily look for their experience with a particular framework or API.
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Sep 26, 2014
Helpful Tools for Web Developers: CSS Arrow, Please
Recently, I’ve discovered that making css arrows is a huge pain in the ass. Luckily, there’s a tool to make it easy for you: CSS Arrow, Please (I added the comma because it was driving me nuts). I highly recommend you check it out if you need an arrow for UI elements such as speech bubbles, tooltips, or popovers.
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Sep 24, 2014
CodePen: Dropdown Menu
I made a simple, static dropdown menu widget that’s meant to act as a template for dropdowns you need to create.
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Sep 22, 2014
A Quick Visual Guide to Relative Positioning in CSS
Getting your head around positioning elements in CSS can be very confusing. When I first started doing front-end web development, I would often end up spending hours trying to figure out why one element or another was refusing render where I thought it should. Nine times out of ten, the problem usually had something to do with the surrounding elements and what the value of their position attribute happened to be.
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Apr 21, 2014
Understanding the Bubble Sort Algorithm
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Apr 14, 2014
A Massive Repo of Programming Interview Questions
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Apr 7, 2014
Creating New Conditionals in Handlebars
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Nov 18, 2013
Helpful Tools for Web Developers: WhatFont Chrome Extension
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Nov 11, 2013
Helpful Chrome Flags For Web Developers
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Nov 4, 2013
JsLint Unexpected Continue Error Explained
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