sacha chua :: living an awesome life » development

My CSS theming setup

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:07:06 +0000

“Why is your window transparent?” a coworker asked me when she noticed my screen. I told her about how I do my CSS theming, and she pulled another coworker over and made me repeat the explanation. Since that seems like something other people might find handy, here it is. Sass: Syntactically Awesome Sytlesheets I rarely [...]

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Quantified Awesome: Squishing my excuses

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

I’ve been fiddling with Quantified Awesome, this personal dashboard that I’m building so that I can keep track of what’s going on in my life and use that data to make it even more awesome. For example: Tracking my time helps me make sure work doesn’t tempt me too much, and that I make time [...]

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CSS theming, magnification, and foot pedals

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

I’m working on the stylesheets for a site, which means lots of fiddly little changes. I decided to make all of my styling changes to my Sass source files instead of editing the attributes in Google Chrome because I found myself forgetting to copy attribute values back from Chrome. Editing the source files directly meant [...]

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Figuring out my CSS workflow

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Yesterday’s coding session with CSS was fantastic. I used WinWarden to make my browser translucent, and I overlaid it on my reference documents. This made it a breeze to check alignment, because I didn’t have to use any measuring tools. I used Chrome’s developer tools to manually adjust the stylesheets until things looked right, adding [...]

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Learning from CSS tweaking

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

My current project is so different from the others I’ve worked on. Instead of building logic, I’m doing front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript, working from Photoshop layers and design PDFs. I installed SASS so that I could gradually untangle the long strings of selectors my predecessor left me. Reading the code, I have a lot of sympathy for [...]

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Rails experiences: Things I learned from project O

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Rails is awesome. We built a workflow/reporting system for ~120 users using Rails 3. My part of the project came to about 468 hours, or roughly 60 workdays (~ 3 months), and I worked with another developer who also put in around the same number of hours. We worked with a graphic designer, a CSS/HTML [...]

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Growing as a developer: Automated tests

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

For this project, I put a lot of time into writing tests. Now they’re paying off. User acceptance testing and beta testing is going to be limited thanks to some real-world project constraints, so we’ll have to catch more bugs ourselves. I want to get to 100% test coverage. That will go a long way [...]

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Quantified Awesome: Thinking about what I want to build next

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

One of the best ways to make the most of those little pockets of time is to keep a someday list. What does my someday list for Quantified Awesome look like? What do I want to build next? Emacs interface, so that I can add data and synchronize my Org-mode files: I’m split between Emacs [...]

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Geek tidbits: Postfix configuration for development and testing

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

From November: We got the mail information for our Rails site, so I reconfigured the mail server. We’re doing a lot of development, and testing mail is much easier when you can send example mail addresses to one bucket of mail. Here’s how I set up the server to redirect everything addressed to @example.org to [...]

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Rails experiences: Building an interactive tutorial

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:00:00 +0000

One of the risks for this Rails project that I’m working on is that new users won’t have enough ramp-up time before we finish the project. We’re planning to wrap up in December, which is the end-users’ busiest time of year. The project also highly depends on external factors we can’t control, so it might [...]

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Ruby on Rails: Extending ActiveRecord::Base to define your own ActiveRecord association methods

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

One of the things I really like about Rails is the ability to add to existing classes so that your code can be cleaner. For example, in the app we’re working on, I need to be able to display a list of offers associated with an organization. I also need to filter that list of [...]

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Quantified Awesome: Development-driven behaviour and integrated tests for life

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:30:00 +0000

2011-12-14: Updated step code In terms of testing code, behaviour-driven development is fantastic. You can write your tests in pretty much plain English using a testing tool like Cucumber for Rails, which makes it easier to communicate with other people (including clients!). There’s a certain satisfaction in getting your tests to pass, and when they [...]

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The joys of development with Selenium web-testing

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve started using the Selenium web-testing framework as part of regular development, and I like it. Selenium makes it easy to automate testing web applications, but it’s also useful for developing web applications. I was working on improving the administrative interface of a Drupal site. To test the new features, I needed to switch back [...]

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Learning browser-based testing with Selenium

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I want to get better at testing my applications so that clients and end-users run into fewer bugs. I’m learning how to use Selenium to write browser-based tests. So far, I’ve written eight tests and fixed three bugs. This is good. I’m using the Selenium IDE, and I’m looking forward to trying other options. I [...]

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Git bisect and reversing a mistaken patch

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 12:00:00 +0000

2011/12/09: Updated links Using version control software such as git is like slicing the bread of programming. It lets you deal with changes in small chunks instead of having to troubleshoot everything at the same time. This comes in really handy when you’re trying to isolate a problem. If you can tell which change broke [...]

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Switching back to Linux as my development host

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:24:15 +0000

I switched back to using my Ubuntu partition as my primary development environment instead of using Windows 7. I still use a virtual machine to isolate development-related configuration from the rest of my system. Linux makes better use of my computer memory. I have 4 GB of RAM on this laptop. My 32-bit Windows 7 [...]

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Managing configuration changes in Drupal

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:00:00 +0000

One of our clients asked if we had any tips for documenting and managing Drupal configuration, modules, versions, settings, and so on. She wrote, “It’s getting difficult to keep track of what we’ve changed, when, for that reason, and what settings are in that need to be moved to production versus what settings are there [...]

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Thinking about our development practices

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:00:30 +0000

We’re gearing up for another Drupal project. This one is going to be interesting in terms of workflow. I’m working with the clients, an IBM information architect, a design firm, another IBM developer, and a development firm. Fortunately, the project manager (Lisa Imbleau) has plenty of experience coordinating these inter-company projects. I feel a little [...]

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VMWare, Samba, Eclipse, and XDebug: Mixing a virtual Linux environment with a Microsoft Windows development environment

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I’m starting the second phase of a Drupal development project, which means I get to write about all sorts of geeky things again. Hooray! So I’m investing some time into improving my environment set-up, and taking notes along the way. This time, I’m going to try developing code in Eclipse instead of Emacs, although I’ll [...]

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Rails: Preserving test data

Mon, 16 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

I’m using Cucumber for testing my Rails project. The standard practice for automated testing in Rails is to make each test case completely self-contained and wipe out the test data after running the test. The test system accomplishes this by wrapping the operations in a transaction and rolling that transaction back at the end of [...]

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