Dennis Gaebel

Integration and Comparison for ES6

If you’re still writing JavaScript using ES5 (also known as ECMAScript 5) and desire to author in ES6 (ES2015) fear not. We’ll look over some logical ways to start using this new syntactical sugar in your own work starting immediately. We’ll discuss and examine approaches to integrate features such as let and const plus compare var versus let and finally understand when to use the spread operator.

The Battle Royale: Atom vs. Sublime

For most developers, text editors are just as sacred as discussing the proper way to say “gif.” Sublime Text has been the heavy hitter for some time and for good reason. As an avid Sublime user I decided to see where Atom stood since I last looked; the time of early beta stages.

What follows is my experience during a period of five days using the Open Source code editor from GitHub told through the perspective of a seasoned Sublime user.

Barebones ES6 project using Gulp

Dennis Gaebel previously discussed preparing for ES6, but in this post he take things one step further and examines an actual project using the tools he discussed in that article. He explains the steps required in order to setup a barebones ES6 project with the help of our faithful tooling companion Gulp.

Preparing for ECMAScript 6

ECMAScript 6 is the upcoming version of the ECMAScript standard and expects ratification some time around June 2015.

ES6 is a significant update to JavaScript, and the first update to the language since 2009. Implementation of these features in JavaScript engines is well underway as we speak. Let’s dive in and see what ES6 is all about.

GSS: Layout Reimagined

Layout on the web is certainly an extremely time consuming process and the most outdated. Floats and such still don’t cut it.

At it’s core, Grid Style Sheets (GSS) reimagines CSS layout and harnesses the Cassowary Constraint Solver – the same algorithm Apple uses to compute native layout. OK sounds good, but is it a pre-processor? Well… no not exactly.

Shaking Hands with RequireJS

Before you know it your site is growing in complexity and your JavaScript files are quickly becoming extremely hard to manage, let alone make performant.

Thankfully these days we have a handful of tools to help with this situation. Let’s examine RequireJS in an attempt to decide if it’s for you… or not.

Optimizing SVG for the Web

So you have an amazing vector and you’re just about ready to send it out for the world to see, but you notice it’s XML (the stuff that makes up an SVG) is a bit bulky. We’ll take a look at a command line tool that can help us clean that up a bit called SVGO.

Understanding & measuring events with Chrome DevTools timeline

Measuring performance is important and so important that we need a hash tag (#perfmatters) to discuss all the difficult scenarios and topics surrounding the question “How can I make my Website faster?” In order to answer that question we have to understand how to collect and measure that data collected.

Compass Sourcemaps

Since the release of Compass v1.0.0 we’ve seen sourcemaps supported across the board. This means tools like Gulp and Grunt (including their compass compiler helpers), CodeKit2 and the CLI will now produce a Compass sourcemap file. This article dives into the config landscape across various tooling systems.

Introduction to SUIT CSS

The ever daunting question we as developers face is “How am I gonna structure things for a project?” As a framework, SUIT CSS provides an implementation of an architecture that others can use as the basis for a working application.