Five Things I Learned This Week

Published on April 5, 2013

Week of April 1st, 2013

  1. Harvest just put out a field guide to pricing.  As someone trying to write a guide for beginning web developers, I love the design of both the "book" and the site that contains the book.  Check it out here.
  2. I've been trying to level up my Javascript skills this week.  The module pattern has been the most helpful in learning how to best structure my code.  Here's a good post from Addy Osmani on the module pattern.
  3. IcoMoon is a great place to create a custom icon font with just the icons needed.  I'll be updating the icons on this site soon.
  4. Bhakti chai is my favorite chai.  I just wish it wasn't so outrageously expensive!
  5. I'm terrible at picking March Madness winners.

Week of March 25th, 2013

  1. Sometimes you have to feel the pain of doing things the wrong way before you know why there's a right way.  I've been working on a single page app and have my Javascript organized with object literals, which worked fine until it's grown to a certain size.  The code is getting increasingly hard to maintain.  I now appreciate the need for the MV* Javascript libraries such as Backbone, Ember, and Angular, and will be digging in to Backbone in the upcoming weeks.
  2. The Link Manager in Wordpress has been removed  starting in version 3.5.  It's now available as a plug-in.  Sites using the Link Manager aren't affected.
  3. In Chrome Dev Tools, you can click and drag elements in the DOM to a new location.  Who knew?  I knew you could modify and delete elements, but I didn't know they could be dragged and reordered so easily.
  4. ActiveRecord in Rails is named after the Active Record pattern first described by Martin Fowler in his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
  5. Sometimes it takes the death of product before you realize there are better options out there.  I was completely happy with Google Reader and never felt the need to look for something else.  Now that Google Reader has been cut, I've moved over to Feedly and am really enjoying the UI.  It's clean and simple, displays my feeds in a variety of appealing ways.  Caio Google Reader!