TLDR: Git hooks are an awesome way to automatically verify your code as you commit your changes I鈥檓 sure we鈥檝e all been there where we accidentally committed a change that we were supposed to undo or wasn鈥檛 ready to be pushed and don鈥檛 realize it until the build breaks or QA finds a bug. The first step I take to avoid committing anything unintentionally is instead of just running git add -A I make sure to review all the changes in the files I鈥檓 potentially committing....
Bittorrent sync is a new file sharing app released by Bittorrent Labs. People are saying its an alternative to popular file syncing services such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, etc. However I don鈥檛 currently see it as being a true replacement for these services but after playing with for the last few weeks I must say I鈥檓 impressed and I feel it does sport some cool features I鈥檝e long wished for in a file syncing app....
I finally migrated my blog from Wordpress to Octopress and given all the blog posts I came across while getting it setup it seems almost like a rite of passage to blog about it once you鈥檝e migrated. Why make the move?! For the hacker street cred of course. But seriously, I was growing really tired with the performance of Wordpress and dealing with shared hosting on Godaddy and my colleague suggested I give Octopress a try and so here I am....
This is a simple tip but one I feel makes my code a bit easier to read. I was never very pleased with the standard way of checking if a dom element exits in jquery: if($('#userName').length !== 0){ //do something with $('#firstName') } The solution I like is to create a very simple jQuery plugin to encapsulate this logic: // this extension reads better when selecting elements $.fn.exists = function () { return this ....
One of the most used features of jQuery is the easy methods it provides to to attach event handlers to dom elements like this simple example: $('.submitButton').click(function() { validateForm(); }); It doesn鈥檛 get much easier than that. However, a lot of times we鈥檒l want to attach events to elements that were loaded after the initial page load such as from the result of an ajax request. This is where the ....
Last weekend I attended the Global Day of Coderetreat in Dallas, TX which was not only my first Coderetreat but also my first time attending a developer community event and I have to say that it was a great and worthwhile experience. If you鈥檙e unfamiliar with the format of a Coderetreat you can read all about it at coderetreat.com but its basically a code kata where you spend most of the day pairing up in 45 min sessions and attempt to solve Conway鈥檚 Game of Life (a fascinating problem by itself)....
I鈥檓 currently working on a project I鈥檝e inherited that uses a Postgres sql backend and I was looking for an easy way to make writing our data access layer less time consuming and painful. My first thought was to use a micro-ORM like Massive but while I鈥檝e heard some really great things about Massive, I felt it might be a tough sell to my team members who aren鈥檛 too comfortable with Expandos and its dynamic nature (I know, but change in baby steps I suppose)....
Thought I would try to make it a thing where I post about a particular tool I鈥檓 using that makes life easier for me as a developer. GhostDoc is a cool little Visual Studio plugin that makes commenting your methods and properties much easier. With a keyboard shortcut or right clicking on a method name, GhostDoc will automatically generate xml documentation comments by intelligently looking at the method name and parameters:...
You may have noticed before that if you try to paste more than one line of text into a textbox in Internet explorer it will on only paste in the first line and disregard the rest. Firefox and Chrome on the other hand will automatically paste all lines of the text onto the one line of the textbox. This issue came up in one of the projects I鈥檓 currently working on where we wanted users to be able to paste in a list of ID numbers they wanted to run a search on....
I thought I might do an occasional series of posts on useful visual studio extensions that I use and I鈥檓 starting off with one of my must-haves: VsVim. Vim, for those of you who don鈥檛, is a powerful command line based text editor that has been around for a long time. I had to learn it when I was a freshman at college and we had to compile our C++ programs on a central Unix server over SSH and I鈥檝e been hooked ever since....