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.

Earlier today, while looking for a new solution to an older IE compatibility issue, I chanced across this nifty script for testing IE on macOS using virtual machines and VirtualBox: xdissent.github.com/ievms.

Web applications concatenate CSS files to improve performance, which can result in large numbers of style rules in a single file. Enter the 4095 selector limitation for IE browsers. An IE bug whereby the browser will only apply style for the first 4095 selectors declared per file. Impacted browsers include IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9.