Category Archives: Tools

Making it easier to generate single retina-pixel (hairline) images

tldr; you can create razor-thin lines for retina displays using CSS, but it takes some hackery. retinahairlinegenerator.com is a site I built for quickly selecting a color and getting the CSS code for a retina hairline. Last year Thomas Fuchs … Continue reading

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Banishing “Your Session Has Expired” from the Internet

It’s hard to use the web without coming across “Your Session Has Expired” at least a few times a year. Maybe you’re trying to book a flight, or reserve tickets for a concert. You could be trying to do some … Continue reading

Posted in HOW-TOs, Tools | 3 Comments

Swap your Rails stack traces for a REPL

The Developer tools I really love are those that help me reduce the time that elapses between a bug occurring and a bug being fixed. One of the more obvious types of bug is a top-level unhandled exception. The message “I’m … Continue reading

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A Better Toolchain for Everyone Building Pixel-Perfect Designs

When building outstanding consumer products, a mix of design and development is always required. Maybe you’re a designer that also codes, or maybe you’re a developer implementing a designer’s pixel mock-ups. Either way, you’re going to be working hard if … Continue reading

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A quick Sublime hack for faster Sass/CSS editor productivity

tl;dr: I made a Sublime plugin to show the corresponding CSS selector in the status bar when your cursor is next to a closing brace. Here’s why. Staying in flow is one of the hardest and most important things you … Continue reading

Posted in CSS, Tools | 1 Comment

Get productive: hacking Sublime Text 2 for faster rails/project navigation

Programmer productivity stems from the ability to easily and efficiently navigate, create and edit the code you need to work with. To this end, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to the efficiency of your own daily workflow. If you’re … Continue reading

Posted in Rails, Tools | 4 Comments

Using the Chrome Inspector to edit your site’s Dark Matter

And by Dark Matter I mean “content that only gets styled by pseudo-selectors”. 🙂 When you’re rebuilding, re-designing or even tweaking a website, it’s often quite painful to restyle the items on a page that are hidden by default. Navigation … Continue reading

Posted in Chrome, CSS, Tools | 1 Comment

How to make Chrome understand the Sass/SCSS in your rails app

When you open the Chrome web inspector, you can browse to the styles that are being applied to your elements. It’s great. Unfortunately, if you’re using a framework like LESS or Sass, then by default Chrome will reference the CSS … Continue reading

Posted in Chrome, CSS, Rails, Tools | 43 Comments