Coder Catchup

A short talk with Jordan Gardiner, a web developer soon to be fresh out of university (college), his experiences and thoughts on his career so far, as well as his love for Laravel. You can find jordan on: http://jordsta.com/ https://twitter.com/jordsta https://github.com/j0rdsta

http://lumen.laravel.com/ Getting started (by the man himself, Taylor Otwell): https://laracasts.com/lessons/introducing-lumen Micro-framework by Laravel Think of it like what Sinatra is to Rails, but maybe better Fantastic for simple APIs Easy migration from Lumen to a full Laravel app Super fast Lots of Laravel features: Eloquent ORM, caching, queues, validation, routing layer, middleware, Laravel service container Very little config required Has a nice CLI tool If you love Laravel, you will love Lumen Might be worth evaluating for smaller projects

Shoptalk Show (http://shoptalkshow.com/): Come on, Dave, Chris, #1 Podcast on the web, guests and rapid-fire (Q&A) The Changelog (https://changelog.com/): All your open source goodness, enough said, subscribe right now Developer Tea (http://www.developertea.com/): A very new podcast and still in its early days, but you wouldn’t think so, Jonathan Cutrell does an amazing job with these easily digestible episodes Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (http://giantrobots.fm/): A great all round podcast from thoughtbot, they talk all the things Boagworld (https://boagworld.com/): Another all round podcast, they cover a huge amount of topics, development, design, business, Marcus’ awesome jokes and more. Ruby on Rails Podcast (http://5by5.tv/rubyonrails): If you are a rails dev, this is a must listen to, great long episodes into all things rails Ruby Rogues (http://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/): If you are a ruby dev and want to get some crazy ruby knowledge, this is the podcast for you CodePen Radio (http

Highly customisable (themes, modules) Amazing content authoring experience* Security SLA Hosting Providers (Pantheon, Acquia, etc) Community CLI Tool Makefiles Installation Profiles Distributions

http://openexchangerates.github.io/accounting.js/ accounting.js is a tiny JavaScript library by Open Exchange Rates, providing simple and advanced number, money and currency formatting. Features custom output formats, parsing/unformatting of numbers, easy localisation and spreadsheet-style column formatting (to line up symbols and decimals). It's lightweight, has no dependencies and is suitable for all client-side and server-side JavaScript applications. Has just about everything you need formatting money! Boom.

block__element—modifier https://en.bem.info/ Cheat Sheet https://css-tricks.com/bem-101/ Articles http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/16/a-new-front-end-methodology-bem/ http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head-round-bem-syntax/ Why is bem awesome and what does it achieve? Reduces the need to nest in sass/less Namespaces your styles Easy to read Sets some nice rules (can scale easily when on boarding more people, just follow BEM, boom) Code reuse Similar to OOP?

The Ruby/Rails gems that I use on a large number of projects with some high level overviews of what they are. Use my gist for reference: https://gist.github.com/jaymiejones86/7800168 Devise: The only authentication library to use (there is clearance though) Rspec: The go to for testing (although, minitest has a spec variation and its pretty awesome) Cabybara: For all the searching and finding of things with integration tests. Pg: Postgres for the DB Unicorn: My favourite app server (gotta look at Puma though, Heroku are recommending it now, lower memory usage) lograge: Keep them logs in check figaro: Useful for setting environment variables bootstrap-sass or foundation (great front-end frameworks) bourbon: Awesome mixin library simpleform: Should be a default in rails for the forms, seriously quiet assets: Make those asset notices nice and clean in dev brakeman: Make sure we are not doing anything dangerous Rails Best Practices: Helps keep things in line with the standards letter opener: Great for in dev whe

A bunch of sass based libraries to help you design your front-end, super lightweight, amazingly flexible and well thought out. Bourbon - http://bourbon.io/ Bourbon is a library of mixins, use as much or as little as you like. Bourbon Neat - http://neat.bourbon.io/ Neat is the grid framework which extends the Bourbon library by adding more mixins and sass functions that will allow you to create your own flexible grid system. Bitters - http://bitters.bourbon.io/ Add some nice out of the box styles to your elements, whether they be forms, type or more. Refills - http://refills.bourbon.io/ A component, pattern and type library which you can use to quickly scaffold your design. Need a nice tabbed UI, maybe a navigation bar, or off canvas navigation, all is covered. Refills is made to be a copy and paste drop in kind of system, you just take what you need. Each pattern/component comes with prebuilt styles but you can also use the unstyled versions which they also have available.

So much awesomeness and fairly easy to learn Solves a lot of grid based and other misc css problems Showcase of solved problems with flex box: http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/ Chris Coyiers Guide: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ Flexbox Adventures: http://chriswrightdesign.com/experiments/flexbox-adventures/ Flexboxin5: http://flexboxin5.com/ Modernizr to detect if flexbox is or is not supported Autoprefixer: Use it to solve some weird version issues https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer Travis Neilson from devtips (twitter, website) on youtube has a great video walkthrough of flexbox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7EIAgfkhmg

Ember 2.0 will go into Beta and all major ember components, liquid fire, ember cli, will have 1.0 releases by June 12th Videos available on ConFreaks JSON API Support out of the box with ember-data (assumes it) Version 1.0 PR has been opened Lauren Tan has a repo of links to everything that happened (videos etc) - https://github.com/poteto/emberconf-2015 Glimmer rendering engine (super super fast, about the same as react, coming soon) All new guides site (versioned) at guides.emberjs.com Ember-cli is recommended now, first class citizen HTMLbars DockYards Tools of the trade "A free design pattern library for Ember applications." - toolsofthetrade.dockyard.com Liquid Fire - So awesome, just watch the video ember deploy command through ember-cli-deploy, making deploying much easier Wicked Good Ember conf is coming soon! wickedgoodember.com, June 16th in Boston

A gem that sits on top of multiple prototyping/building tools… or as they say "Static site starter kits from your friends at thoughtbot" Checkout Proteus at http://thoughtbot.github.io/proteus/ Currently the gem supports setting up middleman, jekyll and a ready to go gulp file All of the kits also come with a bunch of other nice to haves bundled in such as haml, coffeescript, sass, bourbon, neat and bitters. Simple to get going gem install proteus-kits proteus new middleman your-project-name proteus setup (sets things up for you, dependencies etc) proteus server (runs a local server) proteus deploy (deploys to github pages, awesome)

Guides and playbook can be really helpful, whether it is for your own organisation internally to run by, allowing yourself and your team to follow and document your processes, or if you would like to follow someone else or gain some insights on how to improve your workflows and business. Some great guides and playbook are: http://goodui.org/ https://github.com/north/north https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/ http://www.feedthebot.com/ http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/ http://jsonapi.org/ http://zurb.com/triggers http://speaking.io/

The pomodoro technique helps for getting things done. Goes against my general theory of just taking breaks when you feel is needed Can be a companion, if you get distracted to often or you seem to take to many breaks Measured in poros, which are blocks of time Attempt to get X poros (4 generally) to get a decent break. Eg each poro completed (default 25 mins), gives you 5 minutes of break time, completing 4 gives you 10 minutes. Its more of a guide not a must do and its configurable. Great app is “Timer” (http://martakostova.github.io/timer/) which is a mac based app, but there are plenty of others, for all platforms.

Out of The Box Experience WordPress A lot going on Fairly complete for what you need Drupal Fairly simple Gets most of what you need done (Drupal 8 solves that) Documentation WordPress Pretty good Searchable “codex" Drupal Amazing documentation Searchable “api" Theming WordPress Much easier to build custom themes Tons and tons of free and paid themes (high quality) Underscores - http://underscores.me/ Drupal Harder to build custom themes (will be easier in Drupal 8, coming soon) Not as many great looking themes (free or paid) Far more robust and featured Plugins/Modules WordPress A lot of plugins available A lot are also pretty meh (not much quality control) Most of the awesome ones are paid Drupal A lot of modules available A lot/most of them are high quality All the modules you need and then some, all free eCommerce WordPress Woocommerce, thats it, its awesome - http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/ Drupal Drupal Commerce (distribution) - https://drupalcommerce.org/ Upgrades/Maintenance WordPress

What front-end CSS frameworks are awesome to use? I cover Bootstrap, Foundation for Apps and Foundation for Sites) as well as Thoughtbot's frameworks: Bourbon, Neat, Bitters, Refills) Foundation for Sites - http://foundation.zurb.com/ Foundation for Apps - http://foundation.zurb.com/apps/ Bootstrap - http://getbootstrap.com/ Bootstrap Themes Bootswatch - http://bootswatch.com/ WrapBootstrap - https://wrapbootstrap.com Thoughtbot Bourbon - http://bourbon.io/ Neat - http://neat.bourbon.io/ Bitters - http://bitters.bourbon.io/ Refills - http://refills.bourbon.io/

I cover in this episode my talk on "Becoming a Better Developer", which was given at Drupal Gold Coast in Australia in 2014. After giving the talk which was received well I had requests to record it, so I gave it a shot on this episode. What do you do to become a better developer?

My workflow for various projects, what tools I use and when I use them, why I use them and why I suggest you look at using some of these tools and workflows as well. Feel free to share your workflows, its always good getting an insight into how others work. Terminal Software/Setup iTerm 2 - http://iterm2.com/ dotfiles - https://dotfiles.github.io/ Vim - http://www.vim.org/ Janus - https://github.com/carlhuda/janus Tmux - http://tmux.sourceforge.net/ tmuxinator - https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator Development Software/Setup Git - http://git-scm.com/ Rails Rails Composer - http://railsapps.github.io/rails-composer/ WordPress WordPress Base Theme - http://underscores.me/ Drupal Drush CLI (for Drupal) - https://github.com/drush-ops/drush Static Sites - http://thoughtbot.github.io/proteus/ Bootstrap - http://getbootstrap.com/ Foundation - http://foundation.zurb.com/ Bourbon http://bourbon.io/ Neat http://neat.bourbon.io/ Bitters http://bitters.bourbon.io/ Refills http://refills.bourbon.io/ Github - https://g

A quick overview of Stripe, why you should be using it and just how all round awesome it is. Stripe - https://stripe.com Hosted payments using Stripe - https://plasso.co/ The creator and uber builder Drew Wilson - drewwilson.com

The podcast is now listed in iTunes, https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/coder-catchup/id965517704, feel free to subscribe, leave some feedback. If you would like to come on the show or have some thoughts, please ping me @codercatchup on twitter.

Just rattling off some thoughts on my experience of getting things done, finding the time to work on side projects, learning new technologies and more.