Considerations when Open Sourcing When open sourcing a gem (or any project, this post can be generalized to not just focus on gems), there are a number of things to consider. The first check is to ensure that the use case is general enough that it is likely to be helpful to other parties. Though the project might never gain many external users, it is a good sanity check before taking on the work to open source the project. Following...
Read MoreOne of the biggest hurdles in effectively using Sass is correctly setting the load path when using Sass libraries. Surprisingly not all libraries set up the load paths correctly. Some libraries add themselves to the Sass.load_paths or the SASS_PATH environment variable, but stomp on paths that were already loaded, which introduces problems like requirements for the order dependencies are loaded. It is clear that the current state of things could use improvement.
Read MoreAs I have mentioned previously in my post on Modular CSS, structuring Sass/CSS is hard. One of the best ways to determine how clean and well structured the resulting CSS within a project is, is to take a look at the markup being used in project. Overly nested elements typically mean overly nested CSS and if you find it difficult to discern the purpose of the classes on those elements, the CSS itself is probably not semantically written. To add...
Read MoreThe Signalman gem's origins As any company grows, it reaches a point where it is no longer in the "startup phase". No longer can the target market arbitrarily be redefined or features be pushed out at a whim. At this point, analytics and A/B testing become increasingly important. A few years ago, we found this to be a point of pain at CustomInk and sought to create a more robust solution to meet our needs. Thus Signalman was born.
Read MoreStructuring CSS is hard. I have worked on many projects where the CSS was just an afterthought, a hack to get the page to look a particular way. With the increasing interest in frontend tools and development, these days are behind us. Ask yourself the question, "how and why do we apply structure to the code we write?" Now you might wonder, why don't we apply these same rules and considerations to the CSS (and Sass) that we write? There...
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