Amsterdam Hack Night
We're starting a monthly hack night! Every last Thursday evening of the month our office will be open for people who want to learn programming, bootstrap a project, hack on open-source or work on a hardware project.
#rbxday at the 80beans office
Next friday is #rbxday, A global day of testing of the alternative Ruby implementation Rubinius. 80beans will be hosting the Amsterdam location at our office.
Slides for my presentation at Fronteers
Yesterday we organized a Fronteers-meetup where roughly 60 people attended. Vasilis van Gemert had a great talk about adaptive design using media queries and I spoke about front-end meta languages like Haml, Sass (+ Compass) and CoffeeScript. The slides are now up on SlideShare. Read the full post for some (small) corrections.
Sprite generation using Lemonade
We often use CSS sprites to make a web site render as fast as possible. This used to be a tedious process of cropping images, putting them in one giant image file and calculating (and remembering) the offset. Not any more! We recently discovered Lemonade, a gem that generates sprites automatically, does all the calculations and updates the CSS. Its usage is really simple: instead of "background-image" you just use "sprite-image" (with some additional, optional parameters) and Lemonade takes care of the rest. Highly recommended!
Introducing WysiHat Engine
Since we were tired of the ugliness and size of TinyMCE — our previous WYSIWYG solution —, we decided to see if we could find a good replacement.
Luckily 37signals released a WYSIWYG editor last year called WysiHat, the “eventually better open source WYSIWYG editor”, so we tried it out. It was simple, no fancy themes or color schemes, just the backend code.
Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets
Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets, or simply "Sass" is a great way of structuring your CSS using Ruby syntax. It spices up writing your CSS in several ways (use constants, do calculations, etc), with the most notable feature being the ability to use nested rules.
IE8 version targeting
A lot has been written about it on a lot of blogs, but as a standards aware front-end developer I just have to comment on the matter. Although pretty much everything has been said about it, both pro and con (mostly con).