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Monthly Archives: September 2012

Linkdump for September 30th

by Rob Friesel

The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing By Michael Feathers. My "tl;dr" take-away: testing for the sake of testing is useless unless you're using the tests as an exercise in critiquing and scrutinizing your code and the intent behind it. (tagged: testing Michael Feathers ) Setting Up a Command Line Clojure App Mike Ebert, writing at […]

review: Accessibility Handbook

by Rob Friesel

Katie Cunningham’s The Accessibility Handbook (O’Reilly, 2012) is a concise and specific introduction to accessibility (a11y) and 508-compliance. Cunningham provides a “walking tour” of the major types of disabilities that web developers need to consider when creating a site for a11y, illustrating how people with those disabilities will use a site, and then detailing easy […]

using lists to hold parameters for Compass functions

by Rob Friesel

This past weekend at Vermont Code Camp, I caught Mike Fowler’s presentation, “Crafting Scalable Stylesheets”. In that presentation, he discusses this notion of “smart” variables (slides 32 through 35), wherein we provide an argument to a mixin (or even just a simple @if statement), and then based on that argument’s type-of value, we select a […]

headless JavaScript unit testing with Jasmine and PhantomJS

by Rob Friesel

Yesterday, I gave a talk (slides are here, and/or rate my talk here) at the fourth Vermont Code Camp on how to run fast, reliable, headless unit tests for JavaScript using the Jasmine BDD test framework and PhantomJS. What follows here is a summary of “the meat” of the talk: specifically, how to execute your […]

Linkdump for September 19th

by Rob Friesel

Cable Is the New Novel By Thomas Doherty, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (tagged: essay narrative television serialization novel ) Do I Really Need A Style Guide? How to determine whether you need a style guide, and how to go about putting one together. (tagged: design style guide ) The End of Global Warming: […]

review: Learning JavaScript Design Patterns

by Rob Friesel

Goodreads.com has a community guideline that states that reviews must be about the book, and not about the author. Now, I happen to agree with the spirit of this guideline, but I also feel like that guideline gets a little fuzzy when you’re looking at non-fiction, and especially fuzzy when you’re talking about technical books. […]

Linkdump for September 17th

by Rob Friesel

Responsive Web Design Patterns (tagged: responsive design RWD ) Zero Bar Fantastic short fiction by Tom Greene over at Strange Horizons. Recommended. (tagged: race science fiction fiction ) Just Enough Ruby Matt Neuburg: My way of describing Ruby is somewhat peculiar, but there is method in my madness. Most discussions of Ruby explain it “from […]