We love coffee here at Web Ascender, and I mean we LOVE IT. We typically consume 3 – 4 pots in a morning, so the path into the break room is well-traveled! We all take turns making coffee when it runs dry, but for a few weeks straight I just couldn’t get my timing right. I’d always arrive just in…
Materialize is a CSS framework built around Google’s Material Design principles. In general, I would describe material design as being very focused with a kind of minimalist aesthetic. Components feel sharp and generally stand out in a subtle yet noticeable way. User interaction such as clicks are accompanied by small yet engaging and visually appealing effects. You can read more…
If you manage your own database servers, at some point you’ve probably thought about moving to “the cloud”. Cloud databases provide some nice benefits when compared to traditional bare-metal servers: Ability to scale up (and down) easily Essentially unlimited disk space (no more “the hard disk is full” panic-attacks!) Automated backups and snapshots of your data Expertly-managed infrastructure, so you…
One of the joys and pains of being a software developer is choosing the right tools for the job. Technology moves so fast, and everyday there are new frameworks and libraries being shared with the world to help you do your job better. You would think this would always be a good thing, but choices can be hard. The best…
This post is a follow up to my previous Setup Android Lollipop Emulator on OS X post which covered the basics of setting up an Android emulator on your machine. Today, let’s take a look at setting up an iOS simulator on OS X. Download and Install Xcode Currently, Apple doesn’t provide a stand-alone simulator app. What you’ll need to do…
In this two-part series, I cover testing a Rails application using RSpec and some other popular gems. If you missed Part 1, head over to Testing Rails 4 Apps With RSpec 3: Part I to get caught up first. In Part 2, with the setup out of the way, we’ll dive into writing tests for the various components of a Rails…
Today I’ll show you a quick and easy way to embed audio files on your website. Believe it or not, we still don’t have the equivalent of the ubiquitous <image> tag for audio files. However, with the increasing adoption of HTML5 standards in modern browsers, we’re getting very close. The current best practice is to use a little bit of…
Website and web application testing should cover a variety of platforms and browsers. You want your application to run smoothly for your widest audience. If you’re like me, your primary machine is OS X and your browsers of choice are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. But what about Internet Explorer? Enter virtual machines. A virtual machine or VM, emulates a complete…
This post is about job control in Unix shells. Job control is your command line shell’s built-in interface for managing multiple jobs. Although I’ve known about and used job control features like & for a long time, I only recently discovered how they all fit together. With your terminal emulator’s tabs and programs like tmux and screen, it’s possible to…
Mobile testing is one of the most important requirements when building a website or web application. Gestures, load times, and browser differences can all effect the user experience. In the case of testing with Android, you have two options. You can either purchase a physical device with the latest and greatest version of Android or choose the more practical (and…