Hi, I’m Chip. I’m a Front End Developer living in the Washington D.C. area, currently working at PBS. My background is in design, so I approach development with a designer’s eye.
One thing that I feel has been a blind spot for myself in terms of my development skill set is testing. That is, writing automated tests that help ensure that your code doesn’t break as you make changes moving forward. I’m still pretty early on in this journey, but wanted to share a few things that I’ve learned.…
Keep reading Getting Started With Front End Tests: a Mindset
When I recently moved this site from Wordpress to Hugo, one of the best parts of the process was that I had a chance to do a content inventory of my posts. I highly recommend this to anyone, even if they are not migrating platforms. I had about 120 posts since I had last relaunched my site.…
Keep reading Migrating a Blog - An Opportunity for a Content Inventory
Welcome to the newly hugo-ified ChipCullen.com I’ve been fairly quiet on the blog front for a few months because I’ve had some other personal projects taking up my free time. But, one thing I’ve been wanting to do for a while was to move my site to a static site generator.…
This seemingly comes up for me every six months or so, and I struggle to remember the whys of this. I just thought I’d share this little pointer as a reminder to myself, and hopefully it helps others. Let’s say you have a clickable element, like a button, and you have some kind of inner element:…
Last year, after getting a promotion, I found myself suddenly in charge of a lot more back end python code. As someone who had almost exclusively worked in the front end (except for some PHP when dealing with Drupal or WordPress) this was new territory for me.
I’ve decided to jot down a few things that I’ve learned that I hope will help folks in a similar position. This is by no means for anyone with even intermediate python knowledge. I’m sure a lot of this will seem super obvious to a lot of folks.
But, if you’re like me and have spent most of your time in the front end, I hope this will orient you a bit.
…For several years now, I’ve been loving a Sass authoring pattern that looks like this:
.class-name {
... &--modifier {
// styles
}
}Which would compile to:
.class-name { ... }
.class-name--modifier { // styles }This was great! I loved it because:
Keep reading Leading Ampersands for modifiers in Sass: An anti-pattern
Have you ever opened up your terminal in OS X and seen this message in your prompt? Last login: Tue Sep 5 13:52:44 on ttys008 You have mail. What mail? Where? Your computer has a simple mail system that it has set up that can, on occasion, try to send you messages.…
Keep reading How to get rid of the "You have mail" message in your terminal