It started with Muxed. I was excited to get a working first build, but despite my development machine being a MacBook Air, I develop most in VM’s using vagrant. My native builds were all linux based. It would be easy enough to move the code to an OSX machine and compile there but I do not like build tools on my native machine. And that would simply be too easy.

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DelayedJob has always been a great “hit the ground running” background task runner for ruby. It is simple to setup, easy to use and can more than carry its own weight in tasks. Don’t know what a backround runner does or why you would use one? I will not delve into why you need one but you can check out a summary here: Background Jobs in Ruby on Rails.

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I have used the asset pipeline heavily since its release in Rails 3.1.0 over two years ago. Only recently did I run in to a handful of gotchas when it came to dealing with stylesheet compilations using Sass. I guest wrote a post about my experience using SASS in the asset pipeline at Unbounce. Head on over to the Inside Unbounce blog to check out the full post.

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I started writing an Angular application to intereact with an API I have produced recently. The Angular app is compiled as a static site with Jekyll. I immediately ran into an issue with Angular. None of my expressions were showing up. I realized it was because Liquid which is included with Jekyll uses the same expression tags as Angular: {{ myVariable }}. This meant the Angular expressions were not making it as raw text into the final template as they were being caught by Liquid.

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“If you enjoy what you do you will never work a day in your life.” Just recently I was elated when a client contacted us. We have been working on an ongoing project with them for over two years. They contacted us just to let us know they had used the project as a demo and witness. They used the project to help acquire funding for twenty-five full scholarships for youth from all over the world to attend any educational insitutue of their choosing.

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Despite being in the HTML 4.01 spec since 1999 I picked up another small frontend tip recently. When adding anchors on a page for the purpose of in-page links my typical method for years has been to add a link with the anchor name in the href and an anchor tag with a name attribute. <a href="#productList">View more products</a> Some page content… <a name="productList"></a> <ul class="productList">…</a> Just the other day @ry5n informed me that a link that corresponds to an elements id will work just the same and there’s no need to add an additional anchor with a name.

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