Category: Uncategorized

Aren’t filler headlines fun to write? They’re even more entertaining when you haven’t slept in 24 hours. When I edited the student newspaper in college, my fellow editors and I would pull an all-nighter every Thursday to get the weekly edition “put to bed.” We’d compete to see who could come up with the most… Continue reading Instant filler text for your mockups and wireframes

It’s got to be the most frustrating problem in programming. You add a new file to your program, maybe a whizbang jQuery plugin. Then you start coding away, incorporating it into your site. But when you go to test it … nothing. It silently fails. You double check your syntax, looks OK. No errors in… Continue reading How to get even the trickiest relative paths right–every time

Does autocomplete promote brain rot? There’s a longstanding debate over whether code completion features in editors are more harmful than they are helpful. When I first started coding professionally, I found this feature incredibly intrusive. Every time I’d type a few characters, my IDE (usually Visual Studio) would flash a menu at me, whether I… Continue reading Rot your brain in no time flat

It hit me like a smack in the face. Join Lines. One of the very first editor productivity tips I ever learned. At the time, I think I was using Notepad++. When I discovered that there was a keyboard shortcut to join two lines of code, removing the hard return and extra whitespace, I couldn’t… Continue reading The one thing in Sublime that you can’t live without …

When you hit friction in your workflow, you have two choices. Option 1: Take to Twitter! Gripe and complain. Option 2: Do something about it. Write a plugin that fixes the problem, then share it with thousands of other developers and earn their gratitude. I often take the easier Option 1, but plugin author Todd… Continue reading Make Sublime’s Find double-plus good

My first job out of college had nothing to do with programming. I worked at my alma mater in the public relations department as a writer and proofreader. The irony here is that, prior to college, I hated writing–and I was a terrible speller. What could go wrong? The PR department frequently sent out mass mailings to… Continue reading Save yourself some embarrassment with this Sublime Text plugin

Rejection hurts. As part of creating Writing Sublime Plugins, I went through the process of building my own keyboard mappings plugin and submitting it to Package Control. I was excited to get my plugin out there. But then my pull request was denied. What? That’s a thing? At the time I didn’t realize that Package Control… Continue reading Every Sublime Text shortcut, right at your fingertips

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to print code. You know, like on paper, with ink and stuff. In my last job, one of my assignments was restyling an off-the-shelf customer portal-type website. The company wanted to rebrand the site to match its main website, so they had their design team work up some Photoshop comps. I… Continue reading How to print code from Sublime Text