Nicole Sullivan

Category: Geek

  • Error messages are my friends, pair programming buddies are my best friends

    This, like most things I’ll ever learn, I learned the hard way. It is difficult to admit, but for a long time, I thought I was doing programming wrongâ„¢ because I kept getting so many error messages. I thought that if I were a real programmer, I wouldn’t get any error messages because I would…

  • Big News – I’m learning Ruby

    So, I’m embarking on an adventure. I’ve decided to learn Ruby. Many people have a pet language and so they respond to that with “Why Ruby?” You can see they are itching to plug their language of choice. To be fair, I made this decision at NodeConf this year. So I can understand how they…

  • Re-visiting the secret power of block fomatting context

    Recently I did a quick talk at Sydney Web Apps meetup about block formatting context, focusing on how it changes the way it interacts with floated elements. I first learnt about this “secret weapon” via Nicole’s blogpost but it wasn’t until recently that I really understood how useful it is. In my talk I talked about how…

  • Easy-peasy Rem Conversion with Sass

    I love rem. I’ve been using it since I first read about it in Jonathan Snook’s article, and even more so since I started building responsive websites. So what is rem? Rem is a value that is relative to the root font-size, meaning the font-size that is set on the <html> element. The browser by…

  • Creating Living Style Guides to Improve Performance

    I recently spoke at JSConf about my experience working with Trulia to create a living style guide. The goal for the project was to improve performance, team velocity, and also to have a more consistent design. It was such a fun project (because their engineers were great to work with) and also successful on all…

  • Why I run my business like an open source project

    When I first started consulting, I used to squirrel away in my corner and code. Some weeks later, I’d deliver my perfect shining gem to the client after, quite frankly, trying to talk to them as little as possible throughout most of the process. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people, I especially enjoyed talking…

  • CSSConf – The selection process

    CSSConf – This is your conference. Last week we invited the CSS community to submit talks for the upcoming CSSConf (May 28th, Amelia Island, FL). The CSS community has an excellent history of curated conferences, and yet we want to do something a little bit different. We want to see what you have to say!…

  • Don’t Feed the Trolls!

    Don’t Feed the Trolls!

    I gave my first-ever keynote this week at Fluent Conference. It was fun and terrifying, in particular because I spoke about a non-technical topic, trolling in the web community. Here is the video: UPDATE: If you would like to take the test I mentioned to uncover your own biases, it is a research project called…

  • Cross-Browser Debugging CSS

    I was helping Laura (a developer who works with me) learn about cross-browser debugging this week, which got me excited to share my process. The first principal is simply: Work with CSS, not against it. CSS has an underlying design and when you work with it, with the natural flow of how CSS is meant…

  • Code formatting for CSS Gradients

    I may have found a way to format CSS3 Gradients that doesn’t make my eyes bleed. Yippee! I was talking to @glan the other day about CSS3 gradients. We were discussing how to break them down into understandable layers and the difficulties when things you need to know about may be split across multiple properties.…