Posted on 5/26/2010 11:57:48 AM by Justin Etheredge
I’ve received more feedback via e-mail on SquishIt than on pretty much any other post or project I’ve ever worked on in the past. I appreciate it! Most all of the feedback has been extremely positive, with people thanking me for creating such a great tool. Well, I don’t know how great it is, but people seem to like it!
Anyways, the one complain that I keep hearing over and over again is that I need to create a better guide to using it. And I agree, even though SquishIt is a breeze to use, I still need to provide a better "getting started" document.
But before I start rambling, let’s get on with the tutorial….
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Posted on 5/17/2010 8:58:03 AM by Justin Etheredge
Richmond Code Camp 2010.1 is coming up this Saturday May 22nd from 7:30am to 5:00pm at J. Sargeant Reynolds Parham Road campus. If you haven’t already signed up, then what are you waiting for?!?! Get over there now! Don’t know what Code Camp is? Well, I’ll let the Code Camp site tell you:
Over 40 sessions concerning software development, methodology, programming languages, database development & administration, business intelligence, reporting, portals and more.
Free registration. Free breakfast. Free lunch. Awesome networking with your peers and dozens of expert speakers. Free WiFi. Incredibly modern classrooms and auditorium. Easy, free parking. Beautiful spring weather (ok, so that one's a guess). What else could you ask for? A foot rub, you say? Umm, no. That's a little weird. We're not touching your feet. But we hope to see you at the Code Camp anyhow.
Check out our website at http://richmondcodecamp.org and be sure to add RichmondCodeCamp@mail.vresp.com to your e-mail whitelist filter so our updates and reminders can get through. See you there!
If you are curious as to what those 40+ session are, then go check out the schedule pdf.
Richmond Code Camp is a blast, and is chock full of awesome talks by some absolutely great presenters. And you know what else? If you show up, you’ll get to meet me. :-) That is what you are really going for, isn’t it?
Posted on 5/12/2010 5:31:21 PM by Justin Etheredge
As I wrote in my last post, I had a little bit of a naming conflict with another project called Bundler. Well, I ran a contest and the results were neck and neck, but the name suggested by my good friend Harper won out. And that name is SquishIt.
Unfortunately, when you delete a repository on GitHub, it doesn’t setup any redirects or anything and it breaks everyone who has pulled down the repository until they repoint their local repositories at the new location. I apologize for this inconvenience, but it is better to get it out of the way now than to wait until the project has even more followers.
You can go find SquishIt at its new home. Please note that the code itself has not yet been updated, but this is going to occur soon to reflect the new name.
Thanks for everyone’s support!
Posted on 5/7/2010 9:20:24 AM by Justin Etheredge
When I created JavaScriptBundler I wanted to create a simple framework that would allow ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC developers to quickly and easily combine and minify JavaScript. Mainly because I wanted something to use…scratch your own itch, as they say.
Then later I added support for CSS, and when I did that, I renamed it to Bundler. Since it was now doing more than just bundling JavaScript. Unfortunately when I did this, I didn’t do my due diligence and search around for other similarly named projects. Because I didn’t do this, I never found out that Yehuda Katz created a project called Bundler (which now seems to be maintained by Carl Lerche).
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Posted on 4/26/2010 8:54:22 AM by Justin Etheredge
Just the other day I put a tweet out on Twitter where I exclaimed that I am not a fan of XML based build systems. Yes, I understand their purpose, and yes they were great in their time, and yes I still use them on almost a daily basis, but I really think that we have better ways that we could be doing this. The most common response from my tweet was “but was is the alternative?” And I thought, yeah, one of the most important things that I have learned in my lifetime is that you never complain about something unless you have a solution. And so I am here today to propose to you a solution…
The Problem With XML Based Build Systems
Before we get into this entire discussion, let me ask you a question… what is it that developers do better than anything else? Got your answer? Well, I know what mine is, and that answer is “write code”. And if that is the case, then why are we so intent on shoving things into giant xml files? Why can’t we write code? The usual argument is that XML based applications allow us to more easily make changes without recompiling, they allow for more flexibility, and they make it easier to write tooling since they are based on a format that everyone can parse. But personally, I don’t think that they offer much value, and instead are the project of the XML hysteria that swept through the programming world a few years ago. In fact, those of us who have been working with these XML based build tools for years probably forget just how ridiculous and obtuse they looked when we first saw them.
So while many people are quick to extol the virtues of XML, they often people forget to point out all of the things we lose when we start writing code in XML. For example, how about all of the tools that our industry has spent so many years crafting and refining. We lose our editors, debuggers, libraries, and all of the other tools that we use in order to get a few minor advantages that XML provides us. Those XML files limit us to the degree where we often find ourselves falling back to writing custom tasks in order to get around those limitations. Custom tasks which are not written in XML, but instead have to be written in code, since after all, the XML in these files is really just a hideously complex configuration system for the code which is actually running underneath.
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