I’ve put out lots of job postings for Ruby on Rails developers in my day, and yet I’ve never used the 37 Signals Job Board because, well, how do I put this delicately? The 37 Signals team is renowned in our little corner of the world, and deservedly so. Their philosophies and products have changed [...]
Subtitle: use screen, and cut way back on your tabs Look at the following picture, and tell me why it sucks. Actually, since this is a blog post, how about I tell you why it sucks instead? I’ve got 4 other terminals open aside from the one I’m actually working in, each one showing the [...]
Color does not add a pleasant quality to design—it reinforces it. ~ Pierre Bonnard Starting a website from a blank slate is always a wobbly moment. You’ve got this new client whom you’re wanting to genuinely help and impress, you’ve never met this person before (most of the time), but because you’re a designer you’re [...]
When I first got my CSS on (did I really just say that?) back in 2006, managing color values in my style sheet was pretty simple: I had my colors for text, and then my colors for elements with solid backgrounds, and that was about it. If I had my act together, maybe I’d write [...]
For one of our current projects, we developed a Pinterest-style ‘share’ bookmarklet which, when clicked from your bookmarks toolbar, injects an iframe containing a share form on top of the page you’re currently on. We spent a good chunk of time really polishing it up and making for a good user experience. You can even [...]
The latest major version of FactoryGirl came out last week, which coincided with an internal debate here on the best use of factories. Often, out of habit, when we’re writing tests, we reach for a Factory when we’re testing a new method. It’s convenient because it gives you some test data to work with, and [...]
I’m working on an MVP for a great client right now. Although the two guys behind the app are really design-y by nature, their goal with this iteration is to produce a basic desktop version, get it in front of users, and see if it’s worth pursuing further. So on the front end, I felt [...]
A commit should not be taken lightly. A commit is a work of art, a labor of love chiseled down to the bare essentials. Think of a project repo as a novel, with each branch as a chapter, each line of code as a sentence, and each commit as a paragraph. I don’t have a [...]
We’re happy to introduce the world to the Pericles Project, an awesome application we helped build and launched just a few weeks ago. Our client had a great idea for a news aggregator that offers you personalized recommendations for which news to read, based on your similarity to other users. It also helps you break [...]
We work with a lot of startups—companies who are anxious to get their great idea built and delivered to the world. One of the biggest challenges startup entrepreneurs face is figuring out exactly what to build and when. Startups don’t have endless capital, like larger corporations, and they can’t explore every idea or build their [...]