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Steve Jobs: King of All Tech Media

Here’s a testament to Steve Jobs’ influence on the industry: a snapshot of the tech news aggregator site Techmeme, with the stories about Steve Jobs, his resignation and Apple highlighted. As I wrote this post, the answer to the question on everyone’s mind, the “Tim Cook: Apple is Not Going to Change” story, became the headliner.

Steve jobs on techmeme

Also notable: at the bottom of the story pile: a story about Microsoft. The Techmeme page used to be peppered with them, but they’ve become increasingly rare over the past couple of years. If it weren’t for the sponsored BizSpark articles in the right-hand-side column, there’d be times throughout the day when there were no Microsoft-related stories at all. In the meantime, I can’t recall ever checking into Techmeme and not finding an Apple-related story.

Keep in mind that this is all based on casual observation and not from carefully logging the contents of Techmeme over the past few years. However, I’m there fairly often as a practitioner of the Global Nerdy technique for using Techmeme to drive more people to your blog.

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That’s Because USB Plugs Have Quantum Spin

Plug in usb

This happens to me every now and again. I swear, it must be quantum spin.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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“Pragmatic Guide to Sass” is in Beta!

Sass

Sass, which is said to be short for “Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets”, is a meta-language that extends CSS3 to do things that plain old CSS can’t do easily or at all, with goodies we’ve come to know and love from our programming languages: variables, nesting, mixins and inheritance. It compiles to well-formatted standard CSS, and you can even have Sass watch your Sass files so that it automatically updates your compiled CSS files as you update your Sass source.

Haml

Sass is the creation of Hampton Catlin, a “Shopifriend” and programmer who’s all about optimizing his programming tools. When he got fed up with building HTML templates for his Rails projects, he created the Haml markup language. Haml’s popular enough that it’s found its way into the most unlikely of places, such as the .NET world, where they’ve implemented it as NHaml. Just as Haml is Hampton’s optimization of HTML, Sass is his optimization of CSS.

Pragmatic guide to sass

It’s only fitting that Hampton is the co-author of the upcoming Pragmatic Bookshelf book Pragmatic Guide to Sass. Like Hampton, it gets straight to the point; it’s going to be about 100 pages long. He recently tweeted that “doing more than 100 pages just seemed like filler.” Given that I’m already behind in my tech reading, I’m glad that Hampton (and his co-author Michael) insist on keeping things concise.

Pragmatic Guide to Sass is currently in beta. You can get it in ebook format immediately (with downloadable updates as more of the book is finished, including the final, finished ebook) for US$13 or buy the ebook + paper book bundle, where you can get the ebook now and both the paperback edition and the final, finished ebook when the book is complete for US$30.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Shopify Gives “The Oatmeal” “Explosive Poopies of Joy”

Brian Alkerton holds up Matthew 'The Oatmeal' Inman's comic, 'Explosive poopies of joy'.

Brian Alkerton, stand-up comic, karaoke wizard and Shopify Guru — the Gurus are a team that help customers succeed with their online shops — is a travellin’ man this week. He was in Boston earlier, and now he’s in Seattle to attend the PAX conference. He’s also doing some remote work and today, he held “office hours” at the legendary Top Pot Doughnuts on 5th Avenue (a stone’s throw from Hotel Five), which is a great place to get some coffee and delicious toroidal baked goods; it’s also a pretty decent place to get some work done.

While there, Matthew Inman, the twisted comics artist behind The Oatmeal (and Shopify customer) dropped by to chat with Brian. He also gave Brian a wonderfully and disturbingly Oatmeal-esque comic with the caption “Shopify gives me explosive poopies of joy.”

Personally, I think it’s all the fiber — his comic is The Oatmeal, after all — but it’s nice to see that we have another scatologically satisfied customer.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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How We Use Git at Shopify

Trunk and branches
Creative Commons photo by Paul Hart.

Over at the Shopify Technology Blog, John Duff explains the Git workflow we use at Shopify. Whether you’re a Git user wondering about how other people use it or looking to migrate from your oldie-von-moldie version control system that’s not expected to catch up to Git for years, you’ll find John’s writeup useful.

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Samuel L. Ipsum (or: When Lorem Ipsum Goes Badass)

Samuel l ipsum

If you’re tired of using the standard “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text in your projects, try Samuel L. Ipsum instead. It spits out any number of paragraphs of text featuring dialogue from Samuel L. Jackson’s movie characters. Note that I said “spits out” rather than generates: there’s no generation going on here; the underlying JavaScript is obfuscated code that randomly selects one or more Samuel L. Jackson lines from his movies, with repeats allowed. Still, if you’re looking for an amusing change of pace and need text for a mockup or prototype, you might find this handy.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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“No Escape”: A Portal Movie

No Escape is a short film set in the world of Portal, and it’s seven very well-done minutes.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.