First time for everything - GNOME JavaScript

It's no secret that web technologies are everywhere now. Be it embedded platforms, cloud software, mobile and desktop apps, your toaster and microve and yes, also the web, imagine that. More and more people are starting to write code in JavaScript, and it's slowly, but surely becoming a universal programming language. Given the low barrier of the language, it's only natural that GNOME also has decided to go with JavaScript for the desktop apps. However to rephrase a quote infamous meme - it is not the same JavaScript that you're used to.

A better approach to nesting in Sass

We've come a long way from completely hand-written CSS to generated CSS via pre-processors. In the early days, I tried to avoid pre-processors. The idea that a tool will generate CSS for you was discouraging. But eventually, the advantages provided by them proved to be much more useful in a big project, and I adopted LESS, then switched to Sass. But I was trapped in the convenience provided by Sass. I did things I shouldn't have done, like nesting.

Improving Nodejs workflow with git hooks

It's always fascinating to see how much of the tasks you can automate. It feels good to save those few extra keystrokes. If you work in a nodejs environment, you are probably using npm and bower for dependency management, and jshint for code quality. But still, you've to run npm install and bower install manually each time the dependencies change. Same with jshint too. Many developers don't bother about jshint and just push code which doesn't validate. There must be a way to enforce this. Don't ya wish?

The war against curly braces

Coding guidelines, there are numerous of them. Everyone prefers a different coding style. After all, it comes down to personal preference, right? One of such practices is the omission of curly braces. It's everywhere, even SASS has a syntax which doesn't have curly braces!

I give you Croma

Color is an integral part of design. Colors help designers express the mood and the emotions in their designs, so it is very important to get them right. However this is much easier said than done. Alas, it is not as easy as pushing an elevator button and getting a Sugar-babes member lapdancing fo you, it is much more or a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

Gulp + Browserify = Awesome!

If anyone used Grunt, he/she would know how much time it could save. I loved Grunt so much until I came across Gulp, a faster and better task runner, which uses file streams making it faster. Browserify is an awesome tool that let's us require files from any JavaScript file, taking care of dependency issues. Usually we create a bundle with browserify for use in the browser, that's where the gulp task comes in. But the gulp-browserify plugin is no longer maintained, as it doesn't provide any extra functionailty over browserify. We would need to write code to use Browserify in gulp. Let's see how.

Why I like frameworks, and why I don't

Web development frameworks are all the rage now a days. Bootstrap, Foundation, Skeleton, and hundreds more, and I don't think if I've even discovered half of them. So, what are they? Why they are so much popular?

Smooth scroll for in page links with CSS3 transitions

For past days, I'm avoiding jQuery animate like crazy, and try to use CSS3 animations and transitions wherever possible. Reason? CSS3 animations and transitions usually give a higher frame rate than jQuery animations and feel much smoother.

Fedora Utils is now "Fedy"

Fedora Utils, a post install utility for Fedora, has been renamed to Fedy. The reasons are the usual legal things and stuff.