While working on a React Native app for Lumpen Radio I got to the point where I was ready to enter beta - and I needed an App Icon for my app. I hit up a few peeps with apps already in the App Store to understand how they created their app icons. Much to my chagrin I found out each of them had created their app icons manually using an image editing tool of some sort. Not wanting to work through the process of manual image creation using a GUI editor I stumbled upon an Inkscape template and accompanying script that’ll do it for you.

I earlier this month I spent way too much time trying to SFTP to Ubuntu Server with Sublime Text. The purpose of the SFTP effort was to set myself up for developing modern web applications on a new Windows 8 machine I bought to play SimCity 2013. And after getting everything working I realized the SFTP method had some gremlins and the file syncing reminded me of Dreamweaver—it simply wasn’t fast enough.

Lately, unless you were running a Linux machine or had the pleasure of owning a Mac with OS X, developing modern web applications has been a bit of a kludge. Enter Vagrant.

Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases development/production parity, and makes the “works on my machine” excuse a relic of the past.

In this article I’ll explain how to set up a development environment in Windows using a virtualized Linux box, suitable for rapid prototyping. Then I’ll take it a step further and explain how to integrate a Backbone-based application framework with Vagrant and Sublime Text, greatly increasing the speed for developing modern web applications on Windows.

I installed DOSBox on my Raspberry Pi today so I could play one of my favorite childhood games: Ultima Underworld - The Stygian Abyss. You can learn more about this game on Abandonia. If you like what you see, follow this guide to set it up on your RPi and be instantly transported back in time with this 1992 retro classic.

I’m learning how to run IRC on my Raspberry Pi so I can have a distraction in my lab. The setup I’ve got is pretty spartan, but that’s what I was going for on a $35 Linux box running off an 8GB SD card. You can do this too! It’s simple and fun. Why not give it a shot?

One of the trickier parts of writing JS for the web is taming async code. Control flow abstractions for handling async JS exist but are commonly overlooked in engineering organizations, which can lead JS projects unknowingly into a labyrinth of IIFEs, through the pyramid of doom ( issue) and directly to callback hell — making code brittle and prone to breakage.

A few years back Sauce Labs co-founder Jason Huggins ( @hugs) was giving a talk at js.chi(), showing us how to use an Arduino to change the color of an LED based on an input. During the talk Jason suggested those interested in microcontrollers check out Pumping Station: One up on Clybourn. So I got some friends together and we went to PS1, and learned the basics of programming an Arduino. The event was a fun experience and, later that night, netted me a working Larson Scanner. Since then I’ve procured a Raspberry PI, and started tinkering with Google Coder. And now it’s time for Tessel.

A couple years back Steve Souders gave a great talk at Fluent Conf titled Your Script Just Killed My Site ( video). During the talk Steve explained front-end SPOF and pointed towards a nice tool for detecting it. Fast-forward a couple of years and front-end SPOF is still a concern in web development. And, when building a single-page app, SPOF is an even bigger deal as it can cause an entire web app to become unresponsive, putting users at the mercy of the browser to download and execute 3rd-party scripts prior to bootstrapping. Read on to learn how to avoid front-end SPOF using Trunk Club’s single-page app skeleton, Brunch with Panache (BWP).

Learn how to avoid front-end SPOF using Trunk Club’s single-page app skeleton, Brunch with Panache

My team at work is currently porting an e-commerce SPA from an older framework over to Brunch with Panache (BWP), our open source development framework for web clients. Like the old framework, BWP uses both Backbone and CoffeeScript. But to make composing applications easier BWP kicks it up a notch and adds in Chaplin, giving us Collection Views.

One of the downsides with the out-of-the-box Collection Views provided with Chaplin is that they use JavaScript-based animation to fade-in the item views once the collection has been fetched. And while this may be OK for many applications, it’s not ideal for apps with pages which have many collection views, or for mobile user agents in general.

Spike at Airbnb just mentioned during a live TechTalk webcast that the Rendr framework they built was open sourced earlier this month:  github.com/airbnb/rendr. The framework leverages Node.js and Backbone.js to allow full-stack JavaScript MVC using a common set of code–greatly improving time to content, improving crawability, and reduces overall application complexity.

During the talk, Meteor and Derby were mentioned, and Mojito *sigh*. And Stitch was also mentioned, as a part of the stack they’re using. So anyway, there you have it. The Holy Grail I talked about. It’s out, but admittedly, according to Spike, not quite finished. Caveat emptor.

rupa/z is an amazing shell script that allows users to traverse a filesystem in no time flat. Use it if you spend any time at all changing directories in a *nix environment. It will improve productivity and spare fat fingers quite a bit of backpedaling.

Sublime Text with CoffeeScript is a JavaScript developer’s dream, but one that doesn’t evaporate in the fog of sleep shortly after waking. After learning about Sublime Text at Fluent Conf 2012 during a plenary talk from Paul Irish, I immediately began looking for ways to incorporate it into my workflow. And now, after having used it for over 8 months in my day-to-day work, I wanted to share a quick primer for those who want to amp up CoffeeScript coding with Sublime Text too.