Links

We wanted to congratulate Ada Developers Academy up in Seattle, WA who successfully raised $46k for their project, which aims to teach more women how to program with Ruby on Rails. We look forward to hearing how the program goes with their students!

Make it Happen!

Our friends over at thoughtbot share some thoughts on being empathetic towards your client (and vice versa)

We’re proud to be an official sponsor of 2013 Rails Rumble, an annual event that challenges Ruby on Rails developers to team up, plan, and build a project within 48 hours.

Wow. This is a game changer for small retail shops that sell their products online.

We’ve spoken to several companies over the past several years about their frustrations with maintaining a single inventory across two platforms (physical and online). Many of these stores were stuck on some custom eCommerce tool that a freelance developer built them several years ago. They weren’t being updated (with security patches, newer Rails releases)… the original developer is long gone and are faced with the scenario of having to hire a team like us to upgrade and improve their site.

In many of these scenarios, we have highlighted that services like Shopify are likely to be a better investment going forward. Just because they’ve invested thousands and thousands into an existing custom platform doesn’t mean they should continue to. While we live and breath off of designing applications and writing code… we don’t want to see anyone waste their money. In many scenarios, the POS was completely disconnected… and we’ve met many shops that are dealing with a QuickBooks inventory and have all these duplicate steps in their process.

I’m really glad to see that Shopify stepped up and went straight down to the retail level. This should alleviate a lot of pain for the small retail shops.

GitHub just announced the release of their GitHub Pages Gem, a simple tool that makes it a cinch to mirror the GitHub Pages server environment locally. A quick install of the Ruby Gem will download the Jekyll gem, all its dependencies, and anything else that GitHub Pages uses to customize its Jekyll environment.

GitHub Pages, a free hosting platform with built-in version control, is powered by Jekyll, a “simple, blog aware static site generator.”

Dmitry Fadeyev guides us through a brief history of “flat” design.

Kris Gale of Yammer talks about the costs of introducing complexity into your application.

While I agree with many points, i do worry that sometimes there is too much of a disconnect between Engineers and the Product Owners. If you’re in the position of asking someone to build something… are you explaining why it needs to be built?

If you’re the person being asked to build something… are you asking why?

Loved this comparison between two types of cereal packaging.

Here is a little knowledge nugget that Jack and I picked up during our time at An Event Apart: Seattle (more on that to come). We learned about this handy little site called caniuse.com that was created by Alexis Deveria. The site lets you look up HTML5, CSS, JS API, SVG, etc. elements to see what their support is across browsers. Then you can assess.. Can I use that?

We are freshly back from the conference and I have already started using and benefiting from it. Give it a look and find out what you can use. (Turns out you can use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8!)

Good article that ties user experience to front end performance.